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Sketches and Studies in Italy and
Greece,
by John Symonds
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Title: Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete Series I, II,
and III
Author: John Symonds
Release Date: July 22, 2006 [EBook #18893]
Language: English
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SKETCHES AND STUDIES IN ITALY AND GREECE, COMPLETE
BY JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
AUTHOR OF "RENAISSANCE IN ITALY", "STUDIES OF THE
GREEK POETS," ETC
NEW EDITION
LONDON JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W. 1914
FIRST SERIES
PREFATORY NOTE
In preparing this new edition of the late J.A. Symonds's three volumes
of travels, 'Sketches in Italy and Greece,' 'Sketches and Studies in Italy,'
and 'Italian Byways,' nothing has been changed except the order of the
Essays. For the convenience of travellers a topographical arrangement
has been adopted. This implied a new title to cover the contents of all
three volumes, and 'Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece' has been
chosen as departing least from the author's own phraseology.
HORATIO F. BROWN. Venice: June 1898.
CONTENTS
THE LOVE OF THE ALPS
WINTER NIGHTS AT DAVOS
BACCHUS IN GRAUBÜNDEN
OLD TOWNS OF PROVENCE
THE CORNICE
AJACCIO
MONTE GENEROSO
LOMBARD VIGNETTES
COMO AND IL MEDEGHINO
BERGAMO AND BARTOLOMMEO COLLEONI
CREMA AND THE CRUCIFIX
CHERUBINO AT THE SCALA THEATRE
A VENETIAN MEDLEY
THE GONDOLIER'S WEDDING
A CINQUE CENTO BRUTUS
TWO DRAMATISTS OF THE LAST CENTURY
SKETCHES AND STUDIES
IN
ITALY AND GREECE
THE LOVE OF THE ALPS[1]
Of all the joys in life, none is greater than the joy of arriving on the
outskirts of Switzerland at the end of a long dusty day's journey from
Paris. The true epicure in refined pleasures will never travel to Basle by
night. He courts the heat of the sun and the monotony of French
plains,--their sluggish streams and never-ending poplar trees--for the
sake of the evening coolness and the gradual approach to the great Alps,
which await him at the close of the day. It is about Mulhausen that he
begins to feel a change in the landscape. The fields broaden into rolling
downs, watered by clear and running streams; the green Swiss thistle
grows by riverside and cowshed; pines begin to tuft the slopes of gently
rising hills; and now the sun has set, the stars come out, first Hesper,
then the troop of lesser lights; and he feels--yes, indeed, there is now no
mistake--the well-known, well-loved magical fresh air, that never fails
to blow from snowy mountains and meadows watered by perennial
streams. The last hour is one of exquisite enjoyment, and when he
reaches Basle, he scarcely sleeps all night for hearing the swift Rhine
beneath the balconies, and knowing that the moon is shining on its
waters, through the town, beneath the bridges, between pasture-lands
and copses, up the still mountain-girdled valleys to the ice-caves where
the water springs. There is nothing in all experience of travelling like
this. We may greet the Mediterranean at Marseilles with enthusiasm;
on entering Rome by the Porta del Popolo, we may reflect with pride
that we have reached the goal of our pilgrimage, and are at last among
world-shaking memories. But neither Rome nor the Riviera wins our
hearts like Switzerland. We do not lie awake in London thinking of
them; we do not long so intensely, as the year comes round, to revisit
them. Our affection is less a passion than that which we cherish for
Switzerland.
Why, then, is this? What, after all, is the love of the Alps, and when
and where did it begin? It is easier to ask these questions than to answer
them. The classic nations hated mountains. Greek and Roman poets
talk of them with disgust and dread. Nothing could have been more
depressing to a courtier of Augustus than residence at Aosta, even
though he found his theatres and triumphal arches there. Wherever
classical feeling has predominated, this has been the case. Cellini's
Memoirs, written in the height of pagan Renaissance, well express the
aversion which a Florentine or Roman felt for the inhospitable
wildernesses of Switzerland.[2] Dryden, in his dedication to 'The
Indian Emperor,' says, 'High objects, it is true, attract the sight; but it
looks up with pain on craggy rocks and barren mountains, and
continues not intent on any object which is wanting in shades and green
to entertain it.' Addison and Gray had no better epithets than 'rugged,'
'horrid,' and the like for Alpine landscape. The classic spirit was
adverse to enthusiasm for mere nature. Humanity was too prominent,
and city life absorbed all interests,--not to speak of what perhaps is the
weightiest reason--that solitude, indifferent accommodation, and
imperfect means of travelling, rendered mountainous countries
peculiarly disagreeable. It is impossible to enjoy art or nature while
suffering from fatigue and cold, dreading the attacks of robbers, and
wondering whether you will find food and shelter at the end of your
day's journey. Nor was it different in the Middle Ages. Then
individuals had either no leisure from war or strife with the elements,
or else they devoted themselves to the salvation of their souls. But
when the ideas of the Middle Ages had decayed, when improved arts of
life had freed men from servile subjection to daily needs, when the
bondage of religious tyranny had been thrown off and political liberty
allowed the full development of tastes and instincts, when, moreover,
the classical traditions had lost their power, and courts and coteries
became too narrow for the activity of man,--then suddenly it was
discovered that Nature in herself possessed transcendent charms. It may
seem absurd to class them all together; yet there is no doubt that the
French Revolution, the criticism of the Bible, Pantheistic forms of
religious feeling, landscape-painting, Alpine travelling, and the poetry
of Nature, are all signs of the same movement--of a new Renaissance.
Limitations of every sort have been shaken off during the last century;
all forms have been destroyed, all questions asked. The classical spirit
loved to arrange, model, preserve traditions, obey laws. We are
intolerant of everything that is not simple, unbiassed by prescription,
liberal as the wind, and natural as the mountain crags. We go to feed
this spirit of freedom among the Alps. What the virgin forests of
America are to the Americans, the Alps are to us. What there is in these
huge blocks and walls of granite crowned with ice that fascinates us, it
is hard to analyse. Why, seeing that we find them so attractive, they
should have repelled our ancestors of the fourth generation and all the
world before them, is another mystery. We cannot explain what rapport
there is between our human souls and these inequalities in the surface
of the earth which we call Alps. Tennyson speaks of
Some vague emotion of delight In gazing up an Alpine height,
and its vagueness eludes definition. The interest which physical science
has created for natural objects has something to do with it. Curiosity
and the charm of novelty increase this interest. No towns, no cultivated
tracts of Europe however beautiful, form such a contrast to our London
life as Switzerland. Then there is the health and joy that comes from
exercise in open air; the senses freshened by good sleep; the blood
quickened by a lighter and rarer atmosphere. Our modes of life, the
breaking down of class privileges, the extension of education, which
contribute to make the individual greater and society less, render the
solitude of mountains refreshing. Facilities of travelling and improved
accommodation leave us free to enjoy the natural beauty which we seek.
Our minds, too, are prepared to sympathise with the inanimate world;
we have learned to look on the universe as a whole, and ourselves as a
part of it, related by close ties of friendship to all its other members
Shelley's, Wordsworth's, Goethe's poetry has taught us this; we are all
more or less Pantheists, worshippers of 'God in Nature,' convinced of
the omnipresence of the informing mind.
Thus, when we admire the Alps, we are after all but children of the
century. We follow its inspiration blindly; and while we think ourselves
spontaneous in our ecstasy, perform the part for which we have been
trained from childhood by the atmosphere in which we live. It is this
very unconsciousness and universality of the impulse we obey which
makes it hard to analyse. Contemporary history is difficult to write; to
define the spirit of the age in which we live is still more difficult; to
account for 'impressions which owe all their force to their identity with
themselves' is most difficult of all. We must be content to feel, and not
to analyse.
Rousseau has the credit of having invented the love of Nature. Perhaps
he first expressed, in literature, the pleasures of open life among the
mountains, of walking tours, of the 'école buissonnière,' away from
courts, and schools, and cities, which it is the fashion now to love. His
bourgeois birth and tastes, his peculiar religious and social views, his
intense self-engrossment,--all favoured the development of
Nature-worship. But Rousseau was not alone, nor yet creative, in this
instance. He was but one of the earliest to seize and express a new idea
of growing humanity. For those who seem to be the most original in
their inauguration of periods are only such as have been favourably
placed by birth and education to imbibe the floating creeds of the whole
race. They resemble the first cases of an epidemic, which become the
centres of infection and propagate disease. At the time of Rousseau's
greatness the French people were initiative. In politics, in literature, in
fashions, and in philosophy, they had for some time led the taste of
Europe. But the sentiment which first received a clear and powerful
expression in the works of Rousseau, soon declared itself in the arts
and literature of other nations. Goethe, Wordsworth, and the earlier
landscape-painters, proved that Germany and England were not far
behind the French. In England this love of Nature for its own sake is
indigenous, and has at all times been peculiarly characteristic of our
genius. Therefore it is not surprising that our life and literature and art
have been foremost in developing the sentiment of which we are
speaking. Our poets, painters, and prose writers gave the tone to
European thought in this respect. Our travellers in search of the
adventurous and picturesque, our Alpine Club, have made of
Switzerland an English playground.
The greatest period in our history was but a foreshadowing of this. To
return to Nature-worship was but to reassume the habits of the
Elizabethan age, altered indeed by all the changes of religion, politics,
society, and science which the last three centuries have wrought, yet
still, in its original love of free open life among the fields and woods,
and on the sea, the same. Now the French national genius is classical. It
reverts to the age of Louis XIV., and Rousseauism in their literature is
as true an innovation and parenthesis as Pope-and-Drydenism was in
ours. As in the age of the Reformation, so in this, the German element
of the modern character predominates. During the two centuries from
which we have emerged, the Latin element had the upper hand. Our
love of the Alps is a Gothic, a Teutonic, instinct; sympathetic with all
that is vague, infinite, and insubordinate to rules, at war with all that is
defined and systematic in our genius. This we may perceive in
individuals as well as in the broader aspects of arts and literatures. The
classically minded man, the reader of Latin poets, the lover of brilliant
conversation, the frequenter of clubs and drawing-rooms, nice in his
personal requirements, scrupulous in his choice of words, averse to
unnecessary physical exertion, preferring town to country life, cannot
deeply feel the charm of the Alps. Such a man will dislike German art,
and however much he may strive to be Catholic in his tastes, will find
as he grows older that his liking for Gothic architecture and modern
painting diminish almost to aversion before an increasing admiration
for Greek peristyles and the Medicean Venus. If in respect of
speculation all men are either Platonists or Aristotelians, in respect of
taste all men are either Greek or German.
At present the German, the indefinite, the natural, commands; the
Greek, the finite, the cultivated, is in abeyance. We who talk so much
about the feeling of the Alps, are creatures, not creators of our
cultus,--a strange reflection, proving how much greater man is than
men, the common reason of the age in which we live than our own
reasons, its constituents and subjects.
Perhaps it is our modern tendency to 'individualism' which makes the
Alps so much to us. Society is there reduced to a vanishing point--no
claims are made on human sympathies--there is no need to toil in
yoke-service with our fellows. We may be alone, dream our own
dreams, and sound the depths of personality without the reproach of
selfishness, without a restless wish to join in action or money-making
or the pursuit of fame. To habitual residents among the Alps this
absence of social duties and advantages may be barbarising, even
brutalising. But to men wearied with too much civilisation, and
deafened by the noise of great cities, it is beyond measure refreshing.
Then, again, among the mountains history finds no place. The Alps
have no past nor present nor future. The human beings who live upon
their sides are at odds with nature, clinging on for bare existence to the
soil, sheltering themselves beneath protecting rocks from avalanches,
damming up destructive streams, all but annihilated every spring. Man,
who is paramount in the plain, is nothing here. His arts and sciences,
and dynasties, and modes of life, and mighty works, and conquests and
decays, demand our whole attention in Italy or Egypt. But here the
mountains, immemorially the same, which were, which are, and which
are to be, present a theatre on which the soul breathes freely and feels
herself alone. Around her on all sides is God, and Nature, who is here
the face of God and not the slave of man. The spirit of the world hath
here not yet grown old. She is as young as on the first day; and the Alps
are a symbol of the self-creating, self-sufficing, self-enjoying universe
which lives for its own ends. For why do the slopes gleam with flowers,
and the hillsides deck themselves with grass, and the inaccessible
ledges of black rock bear their tufts of crimson primroses and flaunting
tiger-lilies? Why, morning after morning, does the red dawn flush the
pinnacles of Monte Rosa above cloud and mist unheeded? Why does
the torrent shout, the avalanche reply in thunder to the music of the sun,
the trees and rocks and meadows cry their 'Holy, Holy, Holy'? Surely
not for us. We are an accident here, and even the few men whose eyes
are fixed habitually upon these things are dead to them--the peasants do
not even know the names of their own flowers, and sigh with envy
when you tell them of the plains of Lincolnshire or Russian steppes.
But indeed there is something awful in the Alpine elevation above
human things. We do not love Switzerland merely because we associate
its thought with recollections of holidays and joyfulness. Some of the
most solemn moments of life are spent high up above among the
mountains, on the barren tops of rocky passes, where the soul has
seemed to hear in solitude a low controlling voice. It is almost
necessary for the development of our deepest affections that some sad
and sombre moments should be interchanged with hours of merriment
and elasticity. It is this variety in the woof of daily life which endears
our home to us; and perhaps none have fully loved the Alps who have
not spent some days of meditation, or it may be of sorrow, among their
solitudes. Splendid scenery, like music, has the power to make 'of grief
itself a fiery chariot for mounting above the sources of grief,' to
ennoble and refine our passions, and to teach us that our lives are
merely moments in the years of the eternal Being. There are many,
perhaps, who, within sight of some great scene among the Alps, upon
the height of the Stelvio or the slopes of Mürren, or at night in the
valley of Courmayeur, have felt themselves raised above cares and
doubts and miseries by the mere recognition of unchangeable
magnificence; have found a deep peace in the sense of their own
nothingness. It is not granted to us everyday to stand upon these
pinnacles of rest and faith above the world. But having once stood there,
how can we forget the station? How can we fail, amid the tumult of our
common cares, to feel at times the hush of that far-off tranquillity?
When our life is most commonplace, when we are ill or weary in city
streets, we can remember the clouds upon the mountains we have seen,
the sound of innumerable waterfalls, and the scent of countless flowers.
A photograph of Bisson's or of Braun's, the name of some well-known
valley, the picture of some Alpine plant, rouses the sacred hunger in
our souls, and stirs again the faith in beauty and in rest beyond
ourselves which no man can take from us. We owe a deep debt of
gratitude to everything which enables us to rise above depressing and
enslaving circumstances, which brings us nearer in some way or other
to what is eternal in the universe, and which makes us know that,
whether we live or die, suffer or enjoy, life and gladness are still strong
in the world. On this account, the proper attitude of the soul among the
Alps is one of silence. It is almost impossible without a kind of impiety
to frame in words the feelings they inspire. Yet there are some sayings,
hallowed by long usage, which throng the mind through a whole
summer's day, and seem in harmony with its emotions--some portions
of the Psalms or lines of greatest poets, inarticulate hymns of
Beethoven and Mendelssohn, waifs and strays not always apposite, but
linked by strong and subtle chains of feeling with the grandeur of the
mountains. This reverential feeling for the Alps is connected with the
Pantheistic form of our religious sentiments to which I have before
alluded. It is a trite remark, that even devout men of the present
generation prefer temples not made with hands to churches, and
worship God in the fields more contentedly than in their pews. What
Mr. Ruskin calls 'the instinctive sense of the divine presence not
formed into distinct belief' lies at the root of our profound veneration
for the nobler aspects of mountain scenery. This instinctive sense has
been very variously expressed by Goethe in Faust's celebrated
confession of faith, by Shelley in the stanzas of 'Adonais,' which begin
'He is made one with nature,' by Wordsworth in the lines on Tintern
Abbey, and lately by Mr. Roden Noel in his noble poems of Pantheism.
It is more or less strongly felt by all who have recognised the
indubitable fact that religious belief is undergoing a sure process of
change from the dogmatic distinctness of the past to some at present
dimly descried creed of the future. Such periods of transition are of
necessity full of discomfort, doubt, and anxiety, vague, variable, and
unsatisfying. The men in whose spirits the fermentation of the change
is felt, who have abandoned their old moorings, and have not yet
reached the haven for which they are steering, cannot but be indistinct
and undecided in their faith. The universe of which they form a part
becomes important to them in its infinite immensity. The principles of
beauty, goodness, order and law, no longer connected in their minds
with definite articles of faith, find symbols in the outer world. They are
glad to fly at certain moments from mankind and its oppressive
problems, for which religion no longer provides a satisfactory solution,
to Nature, where they vaguely localise the spirit that broods over us
controlling all our being. To such men Goethe's hymn is a form of faith,
and born of such a mood are the following far humbler verses:-At Mürren let the morning lead thee out To walk upon the cold and
cloven hills, To hear the congregated mountains shout Their pæan of a
thousand foaming rills. Raimented with intolerable light The
snow-peaks stand above thee, row on row Arising, each a seraph in his
might; An organ each of varied stop doth blow. Heaven's azure dome
trembles through all her spheres, Feeling that music vibrate; and the
sun Raises his tenor as he upward steers, And all the glory-coated mists
that run Below him in the valley, hear his voice, And cry unto the dewy
fields, Rejoice!
There is a profound sympathy between music and fine scenery: they
both affect us in the same way, stirring strong but undefined emotions,
which express themselves in 'idle tears,' or evoking thoughts 'which lie,'
as Wordsworth says, 'too deep for tears,' beyond the reach of any words.
How little we know what multitudes of mingling reminiscences, held in
solution by the mind, and colouring its fancy with the iridescence of
variable hues, go to make up the sentiments which music or which
mountains stir! It is the very vagueness, changefulness, and dreamlike
indistinctness of these feelings which cause their charm; they
harmonise with the haziness of our beliefs and seem to make our very
doubts melodious. For this reason it is obvious that unrestrained
indulgence in the pleasures of music or of scenery may tend to destroy
habits of clear thinking, sentimentalise the mind, and render it more apt
to entertain embryonic fancies than to bring ideas to definite perfection.
If hours of thoughtfulness and seclusion are necessary to the
development of a true love for the Alps, it is no less essential to a right
understanding of their beauty that we should pass some wet and
gloomy days among the mountains. The unclouded sunsets and sunrises
which often follow one another in September in the Alps, have
something terrible. They produce a satiety of splendour, and oppress
the mind with a sense of perpetuity. I remember spending such a season
in one of the Oberland valleys, high up above the pine-trees, in a little
châlet. Morning after morning I awoke to see the sunbeams glittering
on the Eiger and the Jungfrau; noon after noon the snow-fields blazed
beneath a steady fire; evening after evening they shone like beacons in
the red light of the setting sun. Then peak by peak they lost the glow;
the soul passed from them, and they stood pale yet weirdly garish
against the darkened sky. The stars came out, the moon shone, but not a
cloud sailed over the untroubled heavens. Thus day after day for
several weeks there was no change, till I was seized with an
overpowering horror of unbroken calm. I left the valley for a time; and
when I returned to it in wind and rain, I found that the partial veiling of
the mountain heights restored the charm which I had lost and made me
feel once more at home. The landscape takes a graver tone beneath the
mist that hides the higher peaks, and comes drifting, creeping, feeling,
through the pines upon their slopes--white, silent, blinding
vapour-wreaths around the sable spires. Sometimes the cloud descends
and blots out everything. Again it lifts a little, showing cottages and
distant Alps beneath its skirts. Then it sweeps over the whole valley
like a veil, just broken here and there above a lonely châlet or a thread
of distant dangling torrent foam. Sounds, too, beneath the mist are more
strange. The torrent seems to have a hoarser voice and grinds the stones
more passionately against its boulders. The cry of shepherds through
the fog suggests the loneliness and danger of the hills. The bleating of
penned sheep or goats, and the tinkling of the cowbells, are
mysteriously distant and yet distinct in the dull dead air. Then, again,
how immeasurably high above our heads appear the domes and peaks
of snow revealed through chasms in the drifting cloud; how desolate
the glaciers and the avalanches in gleams of light that struggle through
the mist! There is a leaden glare peculiar to clouds, which makes the
snow and ice more lurid. Not far from the house where I am writing,
the avalanche that swept away the bridge last winter is lying now,
dripping away, dank and dirty, like a rotting whale. I can see it from
my window, green beech-boughs nodding over it, forlorn larches
bending their tattered branches by its side, splinters of broken pine
protruding from its muddy caves, the boulders on its flank, and the
hoarse hungry torrent tossing up its tongues to lick the ragged edge of
snow. Close by, the meadows, spangled with yellow flowers and red
and blue, look even more brilliant than if the sun were shining on them.
Every cup and blade of grass is drinking. But the scene changes; the
mist has turned into rain-clouds, and the steady rain drips down,
incessant, blotting out the view. Then, too, what a joy it is if the clouds
break towards evening with a north wind, and a rainbow in the valley
gives promise of a bright to-morrow! We look up to the cliffs above
our heads, and see that they have just been powdered with the snow
that is a sign of better weather.
Such rainy days ought to be spent in places like Seelisberg and Mürren,
at the edge of precipices, in front of mountains, or above a lake. The
cloud-masses crawl and tumble about the valleys like a brood of
dragons; now creeping along the ledges of the rock with sinuous
self-adjustment to its turns and twists; now launching out into the deep,
repelled by battling winds, or driven onward in a coil of twisted and
contorted serpent curls. In the midst of summer these wet seasons often
end in a heavy fall of snow. You wake some morning to see the
meadows which last night were gay with July flowers huddled up in
snow a foot in depth. But fair weather does not tarry long to reappear.
You put on your thickest boots and sally forth to find the great cups of
the gentians full of snow, and to watch the rising of the cloud-wreaths
under the hot sun. Bad dreams or sickly thoughts, dissipated by
returning daylight or a friend's face, do not fly away more rapidly and
pleasantly than those swift glory-coated mists that lose themselves we
know not where in the blue depths of the sky.
In contrast with these rainy days nothing can be more perfect than clear
moonlight nights. There is a terrace upon the roof of the inn at
Courmayeur where one may spend hours in the silent watches, when all
the world has gone to sleep beneath. The Mont Chétif and the Mont de
la Saxe form a gigantic portal not unworthy of the pile that lies beyond.
For Mont Blanc resembles a vast cathedral; its countless spires are
scattered over a mass like that of the Duomo at Milan, rising into one
tower at the end. By night the glaciers glitter in the steady moon;
domes, pinnacles, and buttresses stand clear of clouds. Needles of every
height and most fantastic shapes rise from the central ridge, some
solitary, like sharp arrows shot against the sky, some clustering into
sheaves. On every horn of snow and bank of grassy hill stars sparkle,
rising, setting, rolling round through the long silent night. Moonlight
simplifies and softens the landscape. Colours become scarcely
distinguishable, and forms, deprived of half their detail, gain in majesty
and size. The mountains seem greater far by night than day--higher
heights and deeper depths, more snowy pyramids, more beetling crags,
softer meadows, and darker pines. The whole valley is hushed, but for
the torrent and the chirping grasshopper and the striking of the village
clocks. The black tower and the houses of Courmayeur in the
foreground gleam beneath the moon until she reaches the edge of the
Cramont, and then sinks quietly away, once more to reappear among
the pines, then finally to leave the valley dark beneath the shadow of
the mountain's bulk. Meanwhile the heights of snow still glitter in the
steady light: they, too, will soon be dark, until the dawn breaks, tinging
them with rose.
But it is not fair to dwell exclusively upon the more sombre aspect of
Swiss beauty when there are so many lively scenes of which to speak.
The sunlight and the freshness and the flowers of Alpine meadows
form more than half the charm of Switzerland. The other day we
walked to a pasture called the Col de Checruit, high up the valley of
Courmayeur, where the spring was still in its first freshness. Gradually
we climbed, by dusty roads and through hot fields where the grass had
just been mown, beneath the fierce light of the morning sun. Not a
breath of air was stirring, and the heavy pines hung overhead upon their
crags, as if to fence the gorge from every wandering breeze. There is
nothing more oppressive than these scorching sides of narrow rifts, shut
in by woods and precipices. But suddenly the valley broadened, the
pines and larches disappeared, and we found ourselves upon a wide
green semicircle of the softest meadows. Little rills of water went
rushing through them, rippling over pebbles, rustling under dock leaves,
and eddying against their wooden barriers. Far and wide 'you scarce
could see the grass for flowers,' while on every side the tinkling of
cow-bells, and the voices of shepherds calling to one another from the
Alps, or singing at their work, were borne across the fields. As we
climbed we came into still fresher pastures, where the snow had
scarcely melted. There the goats and cattle were collected, and the
shepherds sat among them, fondling the kids and calling them by name.
When they called, the creatures came, expecting salt and bread. It was
pretty to see them lying near their masters, playing and butting at them
with their horns, or bleating for the sweet rye-bread. The women
knitted stockings, laughing among themselves, and singing all the
while. As soon as we reached them, they gathered round to talk. An old
herdsman, who was clearly the patriarch of this Arcadia, asked us many
questions in a slow deliberate voice. We told him who we were, and
tried to interest him in the cattle-plague, which he appeared to regard as
an evil very unreal and far away--like the murrain upon Pharaoh's herds
which one reads about in Exodus. But he was courteous and polite,
doing the honours of his pasture with simplicity and ease. He took us to
his châlet and gave us bowls of pure cold milk. It was a funny little
wooden house, clean and dark. The sky peeped through its tiles, and if
shepherds were not in the habit of sleeping soundly all night long, they
might count the setting and rising stars without lifting their heads from
the pillow. He told us how far pleasanter they found the summer season
than the long cold winter which they have to spend in gloomy houses in
Courmayeur. This, indeed, is the true pastoral life which poets have
described--a happy summer holiday among the flowers, well occupied
with simple cares, and harassed by 'no enemy but winter and rough
weather.'
Very much of the charm of Switzerland belongs to simple things--to
greetings from the herdsmen, the 'Guten Morgen,' and 'Guten Abend,'
that are invariably given and taken upon mountain paths; to the tame
creatures, with their large dark eyes, who raise their heads one moment
from the pasture while you pass; and to the plants that grow beneath
your feet. The latter end of May is the time when spring begins in the
high Alps. Wherever sunlight smiles away a patch of snow, the brown
turf soon becomes green velvet, and the velvet stars itself with red and
white and gold and blue. You almost see the grass and lilies grow. First
come pale crocuses and lilac soldanellas. These break the last
dissolving clods of snow, and stand upon an island, with the cold wall
they have thawed all round them. It is the fate of these poor flowers to
spring and flourish on the very skirts of retreating winter; they soon
wither--the frilled chalice of the soldanella shrivels up and the crocus
fades away before the grass has grown; the sun, which is bringing all
the other plants to life, scorches their tender petals. Often when summer
has fairly come, you still may see their pearly cups and lilac bells by
the side of avalanches, between the chill snow and the fiery sun,
blooming and fading hour by hour. They have as it were but a Pisgah
view of the promised land, of the spring which they are foremost to
proclaim. Next come the clumsy gentians and yellow anemones,
covered with soft down like fledgling birds. These are among the
earliest and hardiest blossoms that embroider the high meadows with a
diaper of blue and gold. About the same time primroses and auriculas
begin to tuft the dripping rocks, while frail white fleur-de-lis, like
flakes of snow forgotten by the sun, and golden-balled ranunculuses
join with forget-me-nots and cranesbill in a never-ending dance upon
the grassy floor. Happy, too, is he who finds the lilies-of-the-valley
clustering about the chestnut boles upon the Colma, or in the
beechwood by the stream at Macugnaga, mixed with garnet-coloured
columbines and fragrant white narcissus, which the people of the
villages call 'Angiolini.' There, too, is Solomon's seal, with waxen bells
and leaves expanded like the wings of hovering butterflies. But these
lists of flowers are tiresome and cold; it would be better to draw the
portrait of one which is particularly fascinating. I think that botanists
have called it Saxifraga cotyledon; yet, in spite of its long name, it is
beautiful and poetic. London-pride is the commonest of all the
saxifrages; but the one of which I speak is as different from
London-pride as a Plantagenet upon his throne from that last
Plantagenet who died obscure and penniless some years ago. It is a
great majestic flower, which plumes the granite rocks of Monte Rosa in
the spring. At other times of the year you see a little tuft of fleshy
leaves set like a cushion on cold ledges and dark places of dripping
cliffs. You take it for a stonecrop--one of those weeds doomed to
obscurity, and safe from being picked because they are so
uninviting--and you pass it by incuriously. But about June it puts forth
its power, and from the cushion of pale leaves there springs a strong
pink stem, which rises upward for a while, and then curves down and
breaks into a shower of snow-white blossoms. Far away the splendour
gleams, hanging like a plume of ostrich-feathers from the roof of rock,
waving to the wind, or stooping down to touch the water of the
mountain stream that dashes it with dew. The snow at evening, glowing
with a sunset flush, is not more rosy-pure than this cascade of pendent
blossoms. It loves to be alone--inaccessible ledges, chasms where
winds combat, or moist caverns overarched near thundering falls, are
the places that it seeks. I will not compare it to a spirit of the mountains
or to a proud lonely soul, for such comparisons desecrate the simplicity
of nature, and no simile can add a glory to the flower. It seems to have
a conscious life of its own, so large and glorious it is, so sensitive to
every breath of air, so nobly placed upon its bending stem, so royal in
its solitude. I first saw it years ago on the Simplon, feathering the
drizzling crags above Isella. Then we found it near Baveno, in a crack
of sombre cliff beneath the mines. The other day we cut an armful
opposite Varallo, by the Sesia, and then felt like murderers; it was so
sad to hold in our hands the triumph of those many patient months, the
full expansive life of the flower, the splendour visible from valleys and
hillsides, the defenceless creature which had done its best to make the
gloomy places of the Alps most beautiful.
After passing many weeks among the high Alps it is a pleasure to
descend into the plains. The sunset, and sunrise, and the stars of
Lombardy, its level horizons and vague misty distances, are a source of
absolute relief after the narrow skies and embarrassed prospects of a
mountain valley. Nor are the Alps themselves ever more imposing than
when seen from Milan or the church-tower of Chivasso or the terrace of
Novara, with a foreground of Italian cornfields and old city towers and
rice-ground, golden-green beneath a Lombard sun. Half veiled by
clouds, the mountains rise like visionary fortress walls of a celestial
city--unapproachable, beyond the range of mortal feet. But those who
know by old experience what friendly châlets, and cool meadows, and
clear streams are hidden in their folds and valleys, send forth fond
thoughts and messages, like carrier-pigeons, from the marble parapets
of Milan, crying, 'Before another sun has set, I too shall rest beneath the
shadow of their pines!' It is in truth not more than a day's journey from
Milan to the brink of snow at Macugnaga. But very sad it is to leave the
Alps, to stand upon the terraces of Berne and waft ineffectual farewells.
The unsympathising Aar rushes beneath; and the snow-peaks, whom
we love like friends, abide untroubled by the coming and the going of
the world. The clouds drift over them--the sunset warms them with a
fiery kiss. Night comes, and we are hurried far away to wake beside the
Seine, remembering, with a pang of jealous passion, that the flowers on
Alpine meadows are still blooming, and the rivulets still flowing with a
ceaseless song, while Paris shops are all we see, and all we hear is the
dull clatter of a Paris crowd.
THE ALPS IN WINTER
The gradual approach of winter is very lovely in the high Alps. The
valley of Davos, where I am writing, more than five thousand feet
above the sea, is not beautiful, as Alpine valleys go, though it has
scenery both picturesque and grand within easy reach. But when
summer is passing into autumn, even the bare slopes of the least
romantic glen are glorified. Golden lights and crimson are cast over the
grey-green world by the fading of innumerable plants. Then the larches
begin to put on sallow tints that deepen into orange, burning against the
solid blue sky like amber. The frosts are severe at night, and the
meadow grass turns dry and wan. The last lilac crocuses die upon the
fields. Icicles, hanging from watercourse or mill-wheel, glitter in the
noonday sunlight. The wind blows keenly from the north, and now the
snow begins to fall and thaw and freeze, and fall and thaw again. The
seasons are confused; wonderful days of flawless purity are
intermingled with storm and gloom. At last the time comes when a
great snowfall has to be expected. There is hard frost in the early
morning, and at nine o'clock the thermometer stands at 2°. The sky is
clear, but it clouds rapidly with films of cirrus and of stratus in the
south and west. Soon it is covered over with grey vapour in a level
sheet, all the hill-tops standing hard against the steely heavens. The
cold wind from the west freezes the moustache to one's pipe-stem. By
noon the air is thick with a coagulated mist; the temperature meanwhile
has risen, and a little snow falls at intervals. The valleys are filled with
a curious opaque blue, from which the peaks rise, phantom-like and
pallid, into the grey air, scarcely distinguishable from their background.
The pine-forests on the mountain-sides are of darkest indigo. There is
an indescribable stillness and a sense of incubation. The wind has fallen.
Later on, the snow-flakes flutter silently and sparely through the
lifeless air. The most distant landscape is quite blotted out. After sunset
the clouds have settled down upon the hills, and the snow comes in
thick, impenetrable fleeces. At night our hair crackles and sparkles
when we brush it. Next morning there is a foot and a half of finely
powdered snow, and still the snow is falling. Strangely loom the châlets
through the semi-solid whiteness. Yet the air is now dry and singularly
soothing. The pines are heavy with their wadded coverings; now and
again one shakes himself in silence, and his burden falls in a white
cloud, to leave a black-green patch upon the hillside, whitening again
as the imperturbable fall continues. The stakes by the roadside are
almost buried. No sound is audible. Nothing is seen but the
snow-plough, a long raft of planks with a heavy stone at its stem and a
sharp prow, drawn by four strong horses, and driven by a young man
erect upon the stem.
So we live through two days and nights, and on the third a north wind
blows. The snow-clouds break and hang upon the hills in scattered
fleeces; glimpses of blue sky shine through, and sunlight glints along
the heavy masses. The blues of the shadows are everywhere intense. As
the clouds disperse, they form in moulded domes, tawny like sunburned
marble in the distant south lands. Every châlet is a miracle of fantastic
curves, built by the heavy hanging snow. Snow lies mounded on the
roads and fields, writhed into loveliest wreaths, or outspread in the
softest undulations. All the irregularities of the hills are softened into
swelling billows like the mouldings of Titanic statuary.
It happened once or twice last winter that such a clearing after snowfall
took place at full moon. Then the moon rose in a swirl of fleecy
vapour--clouds above, beneath, and all around. The sky was blue as
steel, and infinitely deep with mist-entangled stars. The horn above
which she first appears stood carved of solid black, and through the
valley's length from end to end yawned chasms and clefts of liquid
darkness. As the moon rose, the clouds were conquered, and massed
into rolling waves upon the ridges of the hills. The spaces of open sky
grew still more blue. At last the silver light came flooding over all, and
here and there the fresh snow glistened on the crags. There is
movement, palpitation, life of light through earth and sky. To walk out
on such a night, when the perturbation of storm is over and the heavens
are free, is one of the greatest pleasures offered by this winter life. It is
so light that you can read the smallest print with ease. The upper sky
looks quite black, shading by violet and sapphire into turquoise upon
the horizon. There is the colour of ivory upon the nearest snow-fields,
and the distant peaks sparkle like silver, crystals glitter in all directions
on the surface of the snow, white, yellow, and pale blue. The stars are
exceedingly keen, but only a few can shine in the intensity of
moonlight. The air is perfectly still, and though icicles may be hanging
from beard and moustache to the furs beneath one's chin, there is no
sensation of extreme cold.
During the earlier frosts of the season, after the first snows have fallen,
but when there is still plenty of moisture in the ground, the loveliest
fern-fronds of pure rime may be found in myriads on the meadows.
They are fashioned like perfect vegetable structures, opening
fan-shaped upon crystal stems, and catching the sunbeams with the
brilliancy of diamonds. Taken at certain angles, they decompose light
into iridescent colours, appearing now like emeralds, rubies, or topazes,
and now like Labrador spar, blending all hues in a wondrous sheen.
When the lake freezes for the first time, its surface is of course quite
black, and so transparent that it is easy to see the fishes swimming in
the deep beneath; but here and there, where rime has fallen, there
sparkle these fantastic flowers and ferns and mosses made of purest
frost. Nothing, indeed, can be more fascinating than the new world
revealed by frost. In shaded places of the valley you may walk through
larches and leafless alder thickets by silent farms, all silvered over with
hoar spangles--fairy forests, where the flowers and foliage are rime.
The streams are flowing half-frozen over rocks sheeted with opaque
green ice. Here it is strange to watch the swirl of water freeing itself
from these frost-shackles, and to see it eddying beneath the
overhanging eaves of frailest crystal-frosted snow. All is so silent, still,
and weird in this white world, that one marvels when the spirit of
winter will appear, or what shrill voices in the air will make his
unimaginable magic audible. Nothing happens, however, to disturb the
charm, save when a sunbeam cuts the chain of diamonds on an alder
bough, and down they drift in a thin cloud of dust. It may be also that
the air is full of floating crystals, like tiniest most restless fire-flies
rising and falling and passing crosswise in the sun-illumined shade of
tree or mountain-side.
It is not easy to describe these beauties of the winter-world; and yet one
word must be said about the sunsets. Let us walk out, therefore,
towards the lake at four o'clock in mid-December. The thermometer is
standing at 3°, and there is neither breath of wind nor cloud. Venus is
just visible in rose and sapphire, and the thin young moon is beside her.
To east and south the snowy ranges burn with yellow fire, deepening to
orange and crimson hues, which die away and leave a greenish pallor.
At last, the higher snows alone are livid with a last faint tinge of light,
and all beneath is quite white. But the tide of glory turns. While the
west grows momently more pale, the eastern heavens flush with
afterglow, suffuse their spaces with pink and violet. Daffodil and
tenderest emerald intermingle; and these colours spread until the west
again has rose and primrose and sapphire wonderfully blent, and from
the burning skies a light is cast upon the valley--a phantom light, less
real, more like the hues of molten gems, than were the stationary
flames of sunset. Venus and the moon meanwhile are silvery clear.
Then the whole illumination fades like magic.
All the charms of which I have been writing are combined in a
sledge-drive. With an arrowy gliding motion one passes through the
snow-world as through a dream. In the sunlight the snow surface
sparkles with its myriad stars of crystals. In the shadow it ceases to
glitter, and assumes a blueness scarcely less blue than the sky. So the
journey is like sailing through alternate tracts of light irradiate heavens,
and interstellar spaces of the clearest and most flawless ether. The air is
like the keen air of the highest glaciers. As we go, the bells keep up a
drowsy tinkling at the horse's head. The whole landscape is
transfigured--lifted high up out of commonplaceness. The little hills are
Monte Rosas and Mont Blancs. Scale is annihilated, and nothing tells
but form. There is hardly any colour except the blue of sky and shadow.
Everything is traced in vanishing tints, passing from the almost amber
of the distant sunlight through glowing white into pale greys and
brighter blues and deep ethereal azure. The pines stand in black
platoons upon the hillsides, with a tinge of red or orange on their sable.
Some carry masses of snow. Others have shaken their plumes free. The
châlets are like fairy houses or toys, waist-deep in stores of winter fuel.
With their mellow tones of madder and umber on the weather-beaten
woodwork relieved against the white, with fantastic icicles and folds of
snow depending from their eaves, or curled like coverlids from roof
and window-sill, they are far more picturesque than in the summer.
Colour, wherever it is found, whether in these cottages or in a block of
serpentine by the roadside, or in the golden bulrush blades by the lake
shore, takes more than double value. It is shed upon the landscape like
a spiritual and transparent veil. Most beautiful of all are the sweeping
lines of pure untroubled snow, fold over fold of undulating softness,
billowing along the skirts of the peaked hills. There is no conveying the
charm of immaterial, aërial, lucid beauty, the feeling of purity and
aloofness from sordid things, conveyed by the fine touch on all our
senses of light, colour, form, and air, and motion, and rare tinkling
sound. The magic is like a spirit mood of Shelley's lyric verse. And,
what is perhaps most wonderful, this delicate delight may be enjoyed
without fear in the coldest weather. It does not matter how low the
temperature may be, if the sun is shining, the air dry, and the wind
asleep.
Leaving the horse-sledges on the verge of some high hill-road, and
trusting oneself to the little hand-sledge which the people of the
Grisons use, and which the English have christened by the Canadian
term 'toboggan,' the excitement becomes far greater. The hand-sledge is
about three feet long, fifteen inches wide, and half a foot above the
ground, on runners shod with iron. Seated firmly at the back, and
guiding with the feet in front, the rider skims down precipitous slopes
and round perilous corners with a rapidity that beats a horse's pace.
Winding through sombre pine-forests, where the torrent roars fitfully
among caverns of barbed ice, and the glistening mountains tower above
in their glory of sun-smitten snow, darting round the frozen ledges at
the turnings of the road, silently gliding at a speed that seems incredible,
it is so smooth, he traverses two or three miles without fatigue, carried
onward by the mere momentum of his weight. It is a strange and great
joy. The toboggan, under these conditions, might be compared to an
enchanted boat shooting the rapids of a river; and what adds to its
fascination is the entire loneliness in which the rider passes through
those weird and ever-shifting scenes of winter radiance. Sometimes,
when the snow is drifting up the pass, and the world is blank behind,
before, and all around, it seems like plunging into chaos. The muffled
pines loom fantastically through the drift as we rush past them, and the
wind, ever and anon, detaches great masses of snow in clouds from
their bent branches. Or again at night, when the moon is shining, and
the sky is full of flaming stars, and the snow, frozen to the hardness of
marble, sparkles with innumerable crystals, a new sense of strangeness
and of joy is given to the solitude, the swiftness, and the silence of the
exercise. No other circumstances invest the poetry of rapid motion with
more fascination. Shelley, who so loved the fancy of a boat inspired
with its own instinct of life, would have delighted in the game, and
would probably have pursued it recklessly. At the same time, as
practised on a humbler scale nearer home, in company, and on a run
selected for convenience rather than for picturesqueness, tobogganing
is a very Bohemian amusement. No one who indulges in it can count on
avoiding hard blows and violent upsets, nor will his efforts to maintain
his equilibrium at the dangerous corners be invariably graceful.
Nothing, it might be imagined, could be more monotonous than an
Alpine valley covered up with snow. And yet to one who has passed
many months in that seclusion Nature herself presents no monotony;
for the changes constantly wrought by light and cloud and alternations
of weather on this landscape are infinitely various. The very simplicity
of the conditions seems to assist the supreme artist. One day is
wonderful because of its unsullied purity; not a cloud visible, and the
pines clothed in velvet of rich green beneath a faultless canopy of light.
The next presents a fretwork of fine film, wrought by the south wind
over the whole sky, iridescent with delicate rainbow tints within the
influences of the sun, and ever-changing shape. On another, when the
turbulent Föhn is blowing, streamers of snow may be seen flying from
the higher ridges against a pallid background of slaty cloud, while the
gaunt ribs of the hills glisten below with fitful gleams of lurid light. At
sunrise, one morning, stealthy and mysterious vapours clothe the
mountains from their basement to the waist, while the peaks are
glistening serenely in clear daylight. Another opens with silently falling
snow. A third is rosy through the length and breadth of the
dawn-smitten valley. It is, however, impossible to catalogue the
indescribable variety of those beauties, which those who love nature
may enjoy by simply waiting on the changes of the winter in a single
station of the Alps.
*****
WINTER NIGHTS AT DAVOS
I
Light, marvellously soft yet penetrating, everywhere diffused,
everywhere reflected without radiance, poured from the moon high
above our heads in a sky tinted through all shades and modulations of
blue, from turquoise on the horizon to opaque sapphire at the
zenith--dolce color. (It is difficult to use the word colour for this scene
without suggesting an exaggeration. The blue is almost indefinable, yet
felt. But if possible, the total effect of the night landscape should be
rendered by careful exclusion of tints from the word-palette. The art of
the etcher is more needed than that of the painter.) Heaven overhead is
set with stars, shooting intensely, smouldering with dull red in
Aldeboran, sparkling diamond-like in Sirius, changing from orange to
crimson and green in the swart fire of yonder double star. On the snow
this moonlight falls tenderly, not in hard white light and strong black
shadow, but in tones of cream and ivory, rounding the curves of drift.
The mountain peaks alone glisten as though they were built of silver
burnished by an agate. Far away they rise diminished in stature by the
all-pervading dimness of bright light, that erases the distinctions of
daytime. On the path before our feet lie crystals of many hues, the
splinters of a thousand gems. In the wood there are caverns of darkness,
alternating with spaces of star-twinkled sky, or windows opened
between russet stems and solid branches for the moony sheen. The
green of the pines is felt, although invisible, so soft in substance that it
seems less like velvet than some materialised depth of dark green
shadow.
II
Snow falling noiseless and unseen. One only knows that it is falling by
the blinking of our eyes as the flakes settle on their lids and melt. The
cottage windows shine red, and moving lanterns of belated wayfarers
define the void around them. Yet the night is far from dark. The forests
and the mountain-bulk beyond the valley loom softly large and just
distinguishable through a pearly haze. The path is purest trackless
whiteness, almost dazzling though it has no light. This was what Dante
felt when he reached the lunar sphere:
Parova a me, che nube ne coprisse Lucida, spessa, solida e pulita.
Walking silent, with insensible footfall, slowly, for the snow is deep
above our ankles, we wonder what the world would be like if this were
all. Could the human race be acclimatised to this monotony (we say)
perhaps emotion would be rarer, yet more poignant, suspended
brooding on itself, and wakening by flashes to a quintessential mood.
Then fancy changes, and the thought occurs that even so must be a
planet, not yet wholly made, nor called to take her place among the
sisterhood of light and song.
III
Sunset was fading out upon the Rhætikon and still reflected from the
Seehorn on the lake, when we entered the gorge of the Fluela--dense
pines on either hand, a mounting drift of snow in front, and faint peaks,
paling from rose to saffron, far above, beyond. There was no sound but
a tinkling stream and the continual jingle of our sledge-bells. We drove
at a foot's pace, our horse finding his own path. When we left the forest,
the light had all gone except for some almost imperceptible touches of
primrose on the eastern horns. It was a moonless night, but the sky was
alive with stars, and now and then one fell. The last house in the valley
was soon passed, and we entered those bleak gorges where the wind,
fine, noiseless, penetrating like an edge of steel, poured slantwise on us
from the north. As we rose, the stars to west seemed far beneath us, and
the Great Bear sprawled upon the ridges of the lower hills outspread.
We kept slowly moving onward, upward, into what seemed like a thin
impalpable mist, but was immeasurable tracts of snow. The last
cembras were left behind, immovable upon dark granite boulders on
our right. We entered a formless and unbillowed sea of greyness, from
which there rose dim mountain-flanks that lost themselves in air. Up,
ever up, and still below us westward sank the stars. We were now 7500
feet above sea-level, and the December night was rigid with intensity of
frost. The cold, and movement, and solemnity of space, drowsed every
sense.
IV
The memory of things seen and done in moonlight is like the memory
of dreams. It is as a dream that I recall the night of our tobogganing to
Klosters, though it was full enough of active energy. The moon was in
her second quarter, slightly filmed with very high thin clouds, that
disappeared as night advanced, leaving the sky and stars in all their
lustre. A sharp frost, sinking to three degrees above zero Fahrenheit,
with a fine pure wind, such wind as here they call 'the mountain breath.'
We drove to Wolfgang in a two-horse sledge, four of us inside, and our
two Christians on the box. Up there, where the Alps of Death descend
to join the Lakehorn Alps, above the Wolfswalk, there is a world of
whiteness--frozen ridges, engraved like cameos of aërial onyx upon the
dark, star-tremulous sky; sculptured buttresses of snow, enclosing
hollows filled with diaphanous shadow, and sweeping aloft into the
upland fields of pure clear drift. Then came the swift descent, the
plunge into the pines, moon-silvered on their frosted tops. The
battalions of spruce that climb those hills defined the dazzling snow
from which they sprang, like the black tufts upon an ermine robe. At
the proper moment we left our sledge, and the big Christian took his
reins in hand to follow us. Furs and greatcoats were abandoned. Each
stood forth tightly accoutred, with short coat, and clinging cap, and
gaitered legs for the toboggan. Off we started in line, with but brief
interval between, at first slowly, then glidingly, and when the impetus
was gained, with darting, bounding, almost savage swiftness--sweeping
round corners, cutting the hard snow-path with keen runners, avoiding
the deep ruts, trusting to chance, taking advantage of smooth places, till
the rush and swing and downward swoop became mechanical. Space
was devoured. Into the massy shadows of the forest, where the pines
joined overhead, we pierced without a sound, and felt far more than
saw the great rocks with their icicles; and out again, emerging into
moonlight, met the valley spread beneath our feet, the mighty peaks of
the Silvretta and the vast blue sky. On, on, hurrying, delaying not, the
woods and hills rushed by. Crystals upon the snow-banks glittered to
the stars. Our souls would fain have stayed to drink these marvels of
the moon-world, but our limbs refused. The magic of movement was
upon us, and eight minutes swallowed the varying impressions of two
musical miles. The village lights drew near and nearer, then the sombre
village huts, and soon the speed grew less, and soon we glided to our
rest into the sleeping village street.
V
It was just past midnight. The moon had fallen to the western horns.
Orion's belt lay bar-like on the opening of the pass, and Sirius shot
flame on the Seehorn. A more crystalline night, more full of fulgent
stars, was never seen, stars everywhere, but mostly scattered in large
sparkles on the snow. Big Christian went in front, tugging toboggans
by their strings, as Gulliver, in some old woodcut, drew the fleets of
Lilliput. Through the brown wood-châlets of Selfrangr, up to the
undulating meadows, where the snow slept pure and crisp, he led us.
There we sat awhile and drank the clear air, cooled to zero, but
innocent and mild as mother Nature's milk. Then in an instant, down,
down through the hamlet, with its châlets, stables, pumps, and logs, the
slumbrous hamlet, where one dog barked, and darkness dwelt upon the
path of ice, down with the tempest of a dreadful speed, that shot each
rider upward in the air, and made the frame of the toboggan
tremble--down over hillocks of hard frozen snow, dashing and
bounding, to the river and the bridge. No bones were broken, though
the race was thrice renewed, and men were spilt upon the roadside by
some furious plunge. This amusement has the charm of peril and the
unforeseen. In no wise else can colder, keener air be drunken at such
furious speed. The joy, too, of the engine-driver and the steeplechaser
is upon us. Alas, that it should be so short! If only roads were better
made for the purpose, there would be no end to it; for the toboggan
cannot lose his wind. But the good thing fails at last, and from the
silence of the moon we pass into the silence of the fields of sleep.
VI
The new stable is a huge wooden building, with raftered lofts to stow
the hay, and stalls for many cows and horses. It stands snugly in an
angle of the pine-wood, bordering upon the great horse-meadow. Here
at night the air is warm and tepid with the breath of kine. Returning
from my forest walk, I spy one window yellow in the moonlight with a
lamp. I lift the latch. The hound knows me, and does not bark. I enter
the stable, where six horses are munching their last meal. Upon the
corn-bin sits a knecht. We light our pipes and talk. He tells me of the
valley of Arosa (a hawk's flight westward over yonder hills), how deep
in grass its summer lawns, how crystal-clear its stream, how blue its
little lakes, how pure, without a taint of mist, 'too beautiful to paint,' its
sky in winter! This knecht is an Ardüser, and the valley of Arosa lifts
itself to heaven above his Langwies home. It is his duty now to harness
a sleigh for some night-work. We shake hands and part--I to sleep, he
for the snow.
VII
The lake has frozen late this year, and there are places in it where the
ice is not yet firm. Little snow has fallen since it froze--about three
inches at the deepest, driven by winds and wrinkled like the ribbed
sea-sand. Here and there the ice-floor is quite black and clear, reflecting
stars, and dark as heaven's own depths. Elsewhere it is of a suspicious
whiteness, blurred in surface, with jagged cracks and chasms,
treacherously mended by the hand of frost. Moving slowly, the snow
cries beneath our feet, and the big crystals tinkle. These are shaped like
fern-fronds, growing fan-wise from a point, and set at various angles,
so that the moonlight takes them with capricious touch. They flash, and
are quenched, and flash again, light darting to light along the level
surface, while the sailing planets and the stars look down complacent at
this mimicry of heaven. Everything above, around, beneath, is very
beautiful--the slumbrous woods, the snowy fells, and the far distance
painted in faint blue upon the tender background of the sky. Everything
is placid and beautiful; and yet the place is terrible. For, as we walk, the
lake groans, with throttled sobs, and sudden cracklings of its joints, and
sighs that shiver, undulating from afar, and pass beneath our feet, and
die away in distance when they reach the shore. And now and then an
upper crust of ice gives way; and will the gulfs then drag us down? We
are in the very centre of the lake. There is no use in thinking or in
taking heed. Enjoy the moment, then, and march. Enjoy the contrast
between this circumambient serenity and sweetness, and the dreadful
sense of insecurity beneath. Is not, indeed, our whole life of this nature?
A passage over perilous deeps, roofed by infinity and sempiternal
things, surrounded too with evanescent forms, that like these crystals,
trodden underfoot, or melted by the Föhn-wind into dew, flash, in some
lucky moment, with a light that mimics stars! But to allegorise and
sermonise is out of place here. It is but the expedient of those who
cannot etch sensation by the burin of their art of words.
VIII
It is ten o'clock upon Sylvester Abend, or New Year's Eve. Herr Buol
sits with his wife at the head of his long table. His family and serving
folk are round him. There is his mother, with little Ursula, his child,
upon her knee. The old lady is the mother of four comely daughters and
nine stalwart sons, the eldest of whom is now a grizzled man. Besides
our host, four of the brothers are here to-night; the handsome
melancholy Georg, who is so gentle in his speech; Simeon, with his
diplomatic face; Florian, the student of medicine; and my friend,
colossal-breasted Christian. Palmy came a little later, worried with
many cares, but happy to his heart's core. No optimist was ever more
convinced of his philosophy than Palmy. After them, below the salt,
were ranged the knechts and porters, the marmiton from the kitchen,
and innumerable maids. The board was tesselated with plates of
birnen-brod and eier-brod, küchli and cheese and butter; and Georg
stirred grampampuli in a mighty metal bowl. For the uninitiated, it may
be needful to explain these Davos delicacies. Birnen-brod is what the
Scotch would call a 'bun,' or massive cake, composed of sliced pears,
almonds, spices, and a little flour. Eier-brod is a saffron-coloured sweet
bread, made with eggs; and küchli is a kind of pastry, crisp and flimsy,
fashioned into various devices of cross, star, and scroll. Grampampuli
is simply brandy burnt with sugar, the most unsophisticated punch I
ever drank from tumblers. The frugal people of Davos, who live on
bread and cheese and dried meat all the year, indulge themselves but
once with these unwonted dainties in the winter.
The occasion was cheerful, and yet a little solemn. The scene was
feudal. For these Buols are the scions of a warrior race:
A race illustrious for heroic deeds; Humbled, but not degraded.
During the six centuries through which they have lived nobles in Davos,
they have sent forth scores of fighting men to foreign lands,
ambassadors to France and Venice and the Milanese, governors to
Chiavenna and Bregaglia and the much-contested Valtelline. Members
of their house are Counts of Buol-Schauenstein in Austria, Freiherrs of
Muhlingen and Berenberg in the now German Empire. They keep the
patent of nobility conferred on them by Henri IV. Their ancient
coat--parted per pale azure and argent, with a dame of the fourteenth
century bearing in her hand a rose, all counterchanged--is carved in
wood and monumental marble on the churches and old houses
hereabouts. And from immemorial antiquity the Buol of Davos has sat
thus on Sylvester Abend with family and folk around him, summoned
from alp and snowy field to drink grampampuli and break the
birnen-brod.
These rites performed, the men and maids began to sing--brown arms
lounging on the table, and red hands folded in white aprons--serious at
first in hymn-like cadences, then breaking into wilder measures with a
jodel at the close. There is a measured solemnity in the performance,
which strikes the stranger as somewhat comic. But the singing was
good; the voices strong and clear in tone, no hesitation and no shirking
of the melody. It was clear that the singers enjoyed the music for its
own sake, with half-shut eyes, as they take dancing, solidly, with
deep-drawn breath, sustained and indefatigable. But eleven struck; and
the two Christians, my old friend, and Palmy, said we should be late for
church. They had promised to take me with them to see bell-ringing in
the tower. All the young men of the village meet, and draw lots in the
Stube of the Rathhaus. One party tolls the old year out; the other rings
the new year in. He who comes last is sconced three litres of Veltliner
for the company. This jovial fine was ours to pay to-night.
When we came into the air, we found a bitter frost; the whole sky
clouded over; a north wind whirling snow from alp and forest through
the murky gloom. The benches and broad walnut tables of the Bathhaus
were crowded with men, in shaggy homespun of brown and grey frieze.
Its low wooden roof and walls enclosed an atmosphere of smoke,
denser than the external snow-drift. But our welcome was hearty, and
we found a score of friends. Titanic Fopp, whose limbs are
Michelangelesque in length; spectacled Morosani; the little tailor
Kramer, with a French horn on his knees; the puckered forehead of the
Baumeister; the Troll-shaped postman; peasants and woodmen, known
on far excursions upon pass and upland valley. Not one but carried on
his face the memory of winter strife with avalanche and snow-drift, of
horses struggling through Fluela whirlwinds, and wine-casks tugged
across Bernina, and haystacks guided down precipitous gullies at
thundering speed 'twixt pine and pine, and larches felled in distant
glens beside the frozen watercourses. Here we were, all met together
for one hour from our several homes and occupations, to welcome in
the year with clinked glasses and cries of Prosit Neujahr!
The tolling bells above us stopped. Our turn had come. Out into the
snowy air we tumbled, beneath the row of wolves' heads that adorn the
pent-house roof. A few steps brought us to the still God's acre, where
the snow lay deep and cold upon high-mounded graves of many
generations. We crossed it silently, bent our heads to the low Gothic
arch, and stood within the tower. It was thick darkness there. But far
above, the bells began again to clash and jangle confusedly, with
volleys of demonic joy. Successive flights of ladders, each ending in a
giddy platform hung across the gloom, climb to the height of some
hundred and fifty feet; and all their rungs were crusted with frozen
snow, deposited by trampling boots. For up and down these stairs,
ascending and descending, moved other than angels--the friezejacketed
Bürschen, Grisons bears, rejoicing in their exercise, exhilarated with
the tingling noise of beaten metal. We reached the first room safely,
guided by firm-footed Christian, whose one candle just defined the
rough walls and the slippery steps. There we found a band of boys,
pulling ropes that set the bells in motion. But our destination was not
reached. One more aërial ladder, perpendicular in darkness, brought us
swiftly to the home of sound. It is a small square chamber, where the
bells are hung, filled with the interlacement of enormous beams, and
pierced to north and south by open windows, from whose parapets I
saw the village and the valley spread beneath. The fierce wind hurried
through it, charged with snow, and its narrow space was thronged with
men. Men on the platform, men on the window-sills, men grappling the
bells with iron arms, men brushing by to reach the stairs, crossing,
recrossing, shouldering their mates, drinking red wine from gigantic
beakers, exploding crackers, firing squibs, shouting and yelling in
corybantic chorus. They yelled and shouted, one could see it by their
open mouths and glittering eyes; but not a sound from human lungs
could reach our ears. The overwhelming incessant thunder of the bells
drowned all. It thrilled the tympanum, ran through the marrow of the
spine, vibrated in the inmost entrails. Yet the brain was only steadied
and excited by this sea of brazen noise. After a few moments I knew
the place and felt at home in it. Then I enjoyed a spectacle which
sculptors might have envied. For they ring the bells in Davos after this
fashion:--The lads below set them going with ropes. The men above
climb in pairs on ladders to the beams from which they are suspended.
Two mighty pine-trees, roughly squared and built into the walls, extend
from side to side across the belfry. Another from which the bells hang,
connects these massive trunks at right angles. Just where the central
beam is wedged into the two parallel supports, the ladders reach them
from each side of the belfry, so that, bending from the higher rung of
the ladder, and leaning over, stayed upon the lateral beam, each pair of
men can keep one bell in movement with their hands. Each comrade
plants one leg upon the ladder, and sets the other knee firmly athwart
the horizontal pine. Then round each other's waist they twine left arm
and right. The two have thus become one man. Right arm and left are
free to grasp the bell's horns, sprouting at its crest beneath the beam.
With a grave rhythmic motion, bending sideward in a close embrace,
swaying and returning to their centre from the well-knit loins, they
drive the force of each strong muscle into the vexed bell. The impact is
earnest at first, but soon it becomes frantic. The men take something
from each other of exalted enthusiasm. This efflux of their combined
energies inspires them and exasperates the mighty resonance of metal
which they rule. They are lost in a trance of what approximates to
dervish passion--so thrilling is the surge of sound, so potent are the
rhythms they obey. Men come and tug them by the heels. One grasps
the starting thews upon their calves. Another is impatient for their place.
But they strain still, locked together, and forgetful of the world. At
length they have enough: then slowly, clingingly unclasp, turn round
with gazing eyes, and are resumed, sedately, into the diurnal round of
common life. Another pair is in their room upon the beam.
The Englishman who saw these things stood looking up, enveloped in
his ulster with the grey cowl thrust upon his forehead, like a monk. One
candle cast a grotesque shadow of him on the plastered wall. And when
his chance came, though he was but a weakling, he too climbed and for
some moments hugged the beam, and felt the madness of the swinging
bell. Descending, he wondered long and strangely whether he ascribed
too much of feeling to the men he watched. But no, that was impossible.
There are emotions deeply seated in the joy of exercise, when the body
is brought into play, and masses move in concert, of which the subject
is but half conscious. Music and dance, and the delirium of battle or the
chase, act thus upon spontaneous natures. The mystery of rhythm and
associated energy and blood tingling in sympathy is here. It lies at the
root of man's most tyrannous instinctive impulses.
It was past one when we reached home, and now a meditative man
might well have gone to bed. But no one thinks of sleeping on
Sylvester Abend. So there followed bowls of punch in one friend's
room, where English, French, and Germans blent together in convivial
Babel; and flasks of old Montagner in another. Palmy, at this period,
wore an archdeacon's hat, and smoked a churchwarden's pipe; and
neither were his own, nor did he derive anything ecclesiastical or
Anglican from the association. Late in the morning we must sally forth,
they said, and roam the town. For it is the custom here on New Year's
night to greet acquaintances, and ask for hospitality, and no one may
deny these self-invited guests. We turned out again into the grey
snow-swept gloom, a curious Comus--not at all like Greeks, for we had
neither torches in our hands nor rose-wreaths to suspend upon a lady's
door-posts. And yet I could not refrain, at this supreme moment of
jollity, in the zero temperature, amid my Grisons friends, from
humming to myself verses from the Greek Anthology:-The die is cast! Nay, light the torch! I'll take the road! Up, courage, ho!
Why linger pondering in the porch? Upon Love's revel we will go!
Shake off those fumes of wine! Hang care And caution! What has Love
to do With prudence? Let the torches flare! Quick, drown the doubts
that hampered you!
Cast weary wisdom to the wind! One thing, but one alone, I know:
Love bent e'en Jove and made him blind Upon Love's revel we will go!
And then again:-I've drunk sheer madness! Not with wine, But old fantastic tales, I'll
arm My heart in heedlessness divine, And dare the road, nor dream of
harm!
I'll join Love's rout! Let thunder break, Let lightning blast me by the
way! Invulnerable Love shall shake His ægis o'er my head to-day.
This last epigram was not inappropriate to an invalid about to begin the
fifth act in a roystering night's adventure. And still once more:-Cold blows the winter wind; 'tis Love, Whose sweet eyes swim with
honeyed tears, That bears me to thy doors, my love, Tossed by the
storm of hopes and fears.
Cold blows the blast of aching Love; But be thou for my wandering sail,
Adrift upon these waves of love, Safe harbour from the whistling gale!
However, upon this occasion, though we had winter-wind enough, and
cold enough, there was not much love in the business. My arm was
firmly clenched in Christian Buol's, and Christian Palmy came behind,
trolling out songs in Italian dialect, with still recurring canaille
choruses, of which the facile rhymes seemed mostly made on a
prolonged amu-u-u-r. It is noticeable that Italian ditties are specially
designed for fellows shouting in the streets at night. They seem in
keeping there, and nowhere else that I could ever see. And these
Davosers took to them naturally when the time for Comus came. It was
between four and five in the morning, and nearly all the houses in the
place were dark. The tall church-tower and spire loomed up above us in
grey twilight. The tireless wind still swept thin snow from fell and
forest. But the frenzied bells had sunk into their twelvemonth's slumber,
which shall be broken only by decorous tollings at less festive times. I
wondered whether they were tingling still with the heart-throbs and
with the pressure of those many arms? Was their old age warmed, as
mine was, with that gust of life--the young men who had clung to them
like bees to lily-bells, and shaken all their locked-up tone and shrillness
into the wild winter air? Alas! how many generations of the young have
handled them; and they are still there, frozen in their belfry; and the
young grow middle-aged, and old, and die at last; and the bells they
grappled in their lust of manhood toll them to their graves, on which
the tireless wind will, winter after winter, sprinkle snow from alps and
forests which they knew.
'There is a light,' cried Christian, 'up in Anna's window!' 'A light! a
light!' the Comus shouted. But how to get at the window, which is
pretty high above the ground, and out of reach of the most ardent
revellers? We search a neighbouring shed, extract a stable-ladder, and
in two seconds Palmy has climbed to the topmost rung, while Christian
and Georg hold it firm upon the snow beneath. Then begins a passage
from some comic opera of Mozart's or Cimarosa's--an escapade
familiar to Spanish or Italian students, which recalls the stage. It is an
episode from 'Don Giovanni,' translated to this dark-etched scene of
snowy hills, and Gothic tower, and mullioned windows deep embayed
beneath their eaves and icicles. Deh vieni alla finestra! sings
Palmy-Leporello; the chorus answers: Deh vieni! Perchè non vieni
ancora? pleads Leporello; the chorus shouts: Perchè? Mio amu-u-u-r,
sighs Leporello; and Echo cries, amu-u-u-r! All the wooing, be it
noticed, is conducted in Italian. But the actors murmur to each other in
Davoser Deutsch, 'She won't come, Palmy! It is far too late; she is gone
to bed. Come down; you'll wake the village with your caterwauling!'
But Leporello waves his broad archdeacon's hat, and resumes a flood of
flexible Bregaglian. He has a shrewd suspicion that the girl is peeping
from behind the window curtain; and tells us, bending down from the
ladder, in a hoarse stage-whisper, that we must have patience; 'these
girls are kittle cattle, who take long to draw: but if your lungs last out,
they're sure to show.' And Leporello is right. Faint heart ne'er won fair
lady. From the summit of his ladder, by his eloquent Italian tongue, he
brings the shy bird down at last. We hear the unbarring of the house
door, and a comely maiden, in her Sunday dress, welcomes us politely
to her ground-floor sitting-room. The Comus enters, in grave order,
with set speeches, handshakes, and inevitable Prosits! It is a large low
chamber, with a huge stone stove, wide benches fixed along the walls,
and a great oval table. We sit how and where we can. Red wine is
produced, and eier-brod and küchli. Fräulein Anna serves us sedately,
holding her own with decent self-respect against the inrush of the
revellers. She is quite alone; but are not her father and mother in bed
above, and within earshot? Besides, the Comus, even at this abnormal
hour and after an abnormal night, is well conducted. Things seem
slipping into a decorous wine-party, when Leporello readjusts the
broad-brimmed hat upon his head, and very cleverly acts a little
love-scene for our benefit. Fräulein Anna takes this as a delicate
compliment, and the thing is so prettily done in truth, that not the
sternest taste could be offended. Meanwhile another party of
night-wanderers, attracted by our mirth, break in. More Prosits and
clinked glasses follow; and with a fair good-morning to our hostess, we
retire.
It is too late to think of bed. 'The quincunx of heaven,' as Sir Thomas
Browne phrased it on a dissimilar occasion, 'runs low.... The huntsmen
are up in America; and not in America only, for the huntsmen, if there
are any this night in Graubünden, have long been out upon the snow,
and the stable-lads are dragging the sledges from their sheds to carry
down the mails to Landquart. We meet the porters from the various
hotels, bringing letter-bags and luggage to the post. It is time to turn in
and take a cup of black coffee against the rising sun.
IX
Some nights, even in Davos, are spent, even by an invalid, in bed. A
leaflet, therefore, of 'Sleep-chasings' may not inappropriately be flung,
as envoy to so many wanderings on foot and sledge upon the winter
snows.
The first is a confused medley of things familiar and things strange. I
have been dreaming of far-away old German towns, with gabled houses
deep in snow; dreaming of châlets in forgotten Alpine glens, where
wood-cutters come plunging into sleepy light from gloom, and sinking
down beside the stove to shake the drift from their rough shoulders;
dreaming of vast veils of icicles upon the gaunt black rocks in places
where no foot of man will pass, and where the snow is weaving
eyebrows over the ledges of grey whirlwind-beaten precipices;
dreaming of Venice, forlorn beneath the windy drip of rain, the gas
lamps flickering on the swimming piazzetta, the barche idle, the
gondolier wrapped in his thread-bare cloak, alone; dreaming of
Apennines, with world-old cities, brown, above the brown sea of dead
chestnut boughs; dreaming of stormy tides, and watchers aloft in
lighthouses when day is finished; dreaming of dead men and women
and dead children in the earth, far down beneath the snow-drifts, six
feet deep. And then I lift my face, awaking, from my pillow; the pallid
moon is on the valley, and the room is filled with spectral light.
I sleep, and change my dreaming. This is a hospice in an unfrequented
pass, between sad peaks, beside a little black lake, overdrifted with soft
snow. I pass into the house-room, gliding silently. An old man and an
old woman are nodding, bowed in deepest slumber, by the stove. A
young man plays the zither on a table. He lifts his head, still
modulating with his fingers on the strings. He looks right through me
with wide anxious eyes. He does not see me, but sees Italy, I know, and
some one wandering on a sandy shore.
I sleep, and change my dreaming. This is S. Stephen's Church in Wien.
Inside, the lamps are burning dimly in the choir. There is fog in the
aisles; but through the sleepy air and over the red candles flies a wild
soprano's voice, a boy's soul in its singing sent to heaven.
I sleep, and change my dreaming. From the mufflers in which his father,
the mountebank, has wrapped the child, to carry him across the heath, a
little tumbling-boy emerges in soiled tights. He is half asleep. His
father scrapes the fiddle. The boy shortens his red belt, kisses his
fingers to us, and ties himself into a knot among the glasses on the
table.
I sleep, and change my dreaming. I am on the parapet of a huge circular
tower, hollow like a well, and pierced with windows at irregular
intervals. The parapet is broad, and slabbed with red Verona marble.
Around me are athletic men, all naked, in the strangest attitudes of
studied rest, down-gazing, as I do, into the depths below. There comes
a confused murmur of voices, and the tower is threaded and rethreaded
with great cables. Up these there climb to us a crowd of young men,
clinging to the ropes and flinging their bodies sideways on aërial
trapezes. My heart trembles with keen joy and terror. For nowhere else
could plastic forms be seen more beautiful, and nowhere else is peril
more apparent. Leaning my chin upon the utmost verge, I wait. I watch
one youth, who smiles and soars to me; and when his face is almost
touching mine, he speaks, but what he says I know not.
I sleep, and change my dreaming. The whole world rocks to its
foundations. The mountain summits that I know are shaken. They bow
their bristling crests. They are falling, falling on us, and the earth is
riven. I wake in terror, shouting: INSOLITIS TREMUERUNT
MOTIBUS ALPES! An earthquake, slight but real, has stirred the
ever-wakeful Vesta of the brain to this Virgilian quotation.
I sleep, and change my dreaming. Once more at night I sledge alone
upon the Klosters road. It is the point where the woods close over it and
moonlight may not pierce the boughs. There come shrill cries of many
voices from behind, and rushings that pass by and vanish. Then on their
sledges I behold the phantoms of the dead who died in Davos, longing
for their homes; and each flies past me, shrieking in the still cold air;
and phosphorescent like long meteors, the pageant turns the windings
of the road below and disappears.
I sleep, and change my dreaming. This is the top of some high
mountain, where the crags are cruelly tortured and cast in enormous
splinters on the ledges of cliffs grey with old-world ice. A ravine,
opening at my feet, plunges down immeasurably to a dim and distant
sea. Above me soars a precipice embossed with a gigantic ice-bound
shape. As I gaze thereon, I find the lineaments and limbs of a Titanic
man chained and nailed to the rock. His beard has grown for centuries,
and flowed this way and that, adown his breast and over to the stone on
either side; and the whole of him is covered with a greenish ice, ancient
beyond the memory of man. 'This is Prometheus,' I whisper to myself,
'and I am alone on Caucasus.'
*****
BACCHUS IN GRAUBÜNDEN
I
Some years' residence in the Canton of the Grisons made me familiar
with all sorts of Valtelline wine; with masculine but rough Inferno,
generous Forzato, delicate Sassella, harsher Montagner, the raspberry
flavour of Grumello, the sharp invigorating twang of Villa. The colour,
ranging from garnet to almandine or ruby, told me the age and quality
of wine; and I could judge from the crust it forms upon the bottle,
whether it had been left long enough in wood to ripen. I had
furthermore arrived at the conclusion that the best Valtelline can only
be tasted in cellars of the Engadine or Davos, where this vintage
matures slowly in the mountain air, and takes a flavour unknown at
lower levels. In a word, it had amused my leisure to make or think
myself a connoisseur. My literary taste was tickled by the praise
bestowed in the Augustan age on Rhætic grapes by Virgil:
Et quo te carmine dicam, Rhætica? nec cellis ideo contende Falernis.
I piqued myself on thinking that could the poet but have drank one
bottle at Samaden--where Stilicho, by the way, in his famous recruiting
expedition may perhaps have drank it--he would have been less chary
in his panegyric. For the point of inferiority on which he seems to insist,
namely, that Valtelline wine does not keep well in cellar, is only proper
to this vintage in Italian climate. Such meditations led my fancy on the
path of history. Is there truth, then, in the dim tradition that this
mountain land was colonised by Etruscans? Is Ras the root of Rhætia?
The Etruscans were accomplished wine-growers, we know. It was their
Montepulciano which drew the Gauls to Rome, if Livy can be trusted.
Perhaps they first planted the vine in Valtelline. Perhaps its superior
culture in that district may be due to ancient use surviving in a secluded
Alpine valley. One thing is certain, that the peasants of Sondrio and
Tirano understand viticulture better than the Italians of Lombardy.
Then my thoughts ran on to the period of modern history, when the
Grisons seized the Valtelline in lieu of war-pay from the Dukes of
Milan. For some three centuries they held it as a subject province. From
the Rathhaus at Davos or Chur they sent their nobles--Von Salis and
Buol, Planta and Sprecher von Bernegg--across the hills as governors
or podestàs to Poschiavo, Sondrio, Tirano, and Morbegno. In those old
days the Valtelline wines came duly every winter over snow-deep
passes to fill the cellars of the Signori Grigioni. That quaint traveller
Tom Coryat, in his so-called 'Crudities,' notes the custom early in the
seventeenth century. And as that custom then obtained, it still subsists
with little alteration. The wine-carriers--Weinführer, as they are
called--first scaled the Bernina pass, halting then as now, perhaps at
Poschiavo and Pontresina. Afterwards, in order to reach Davos, the
pass of the Scaletta rose before them--a wilderness of untracked
snow-drifts. The country-folk still point to narrow, light hand-sledges,
on which the casks were charged before the last pitch of the pass. Some
wine came, no doubt, on pack-saddles. A meadow in front of the
Dischma-Thal, where the pass ends, still bears the name of the
Ross-Weid, or horse-pasture. It was here that the beasts of burden used
for this wine-service, rested after their long labours. In favourable
weather the whole journey from Tirano would have occupied at least
four days, with scanty halts at night.
The Valtelline slipped from the hands of the Grisons early in this
century. It is rumoured that one of the Von Salis family negotiated
matters with Napoleon more for his private benefit than for the interests
of the state. However this may have been, when the Graubünden
became a Swiss Canton, after four centuries of sovereign independence,
the whole Valtelline passed to Austria, and so eventually to Italy.
According to modern and just notions of nationality, this was right. In
their period of power, the Grisons masters had treated their Italian
dependencies with harshness. The Valtelline is an Italian valley,
connected with the rest of the peninsula by ties of race and language. It
is, moreover, geographically linked to Italy by the great stream of the
Adda, which takes its rise upon the Stelvio, and after passing through
the Lake of Como, swells the volume of the Po.
But, though politically severed from the Valtelline, the Engadiners and
Davosers have not dropped their old habit of importing its best produce.
What they formerly levied as masters, they now acquire by purchase.
The Italian revenue derives a large profit from the frontier dues paid at
the gate between Tirano and Poschiavo on the Bernina road. Much of
the same wine enters Switzerland by another route, travelling from
Sondrio to Chiavenna and across the Splügen. But until quite recently,
the wine itself could scarcely be found outside the Canton. It was
indeed quoted upon Lombard wine-lists. Yet no one drank it; and when
I tasted it at Milan, I found it quite unrecognisable. The fact seems to
be that the Graubündeners alone know how to deal with it; and, as I
have hinted, the wine requires a mountain climate for its full
development.
II
The district where the wine of Valtellina is grown extends, roughly
speaking, from Tirano to Morbegno, a distance of some fifty-four miles.
The best sorts come from the middle of this region. High up in the
valley, soil and climate are alike less favourable. Low down a coarser,
earthier quality springs from fat land where the valley broadens. The
northern hillsides to a very considerable height above the river are
covered with vineyards. The southern slopes on the left bank of the
Adda, lying more in shade, yield but little. Inferno, Grumello, and Perla
di Sassella are the names of famous vineyards. Sassella is the general
name for a large tract. Buying an Inferno, Grumello, or Perla di
Sassella wine, it would be absurd to suppose that one obtained it
precisely from the eponymous estate. But as each of these vineyards
yields a marked quality of wine, which is taken as standard-giving, the
produce of the whole district may be broadly classified as approaching
more or less nearly to one of these accepted types. The Inferno,
Grumello, and Perla di Sassella of commerce are therefore three sorts
of good Valtelline, ticketed with famous names to indicate certain
differences of quality. Montagner, as the name implies, is a somewhat
lighter wine, grown higher up in the hill-vineyards. And of this class
there are many species, some approximating to Sassella in delicacy of
flavour, others approaching the tart lightness of the Villa vintage. This
last takes its title from a village in the neighbourhood of Tirano, where
a table-wine is chiefly grown.
Forzato is the strongest, dearest, longest-lived of this whole family of
wines. It is manufactured chiefly at Tirano; and, as will be understood
from its name, does not profess to belong to any one of the famous
localities. Forzato or Sforzato, forced or enforced, is in fact a wine
which has undergone a more artificial process. In German the people
call it Strohwein, which also points to the method of its preparation.
The finest grapes are selected and dried in the sun (hence the Stroh) for
a period of eight or nine weeks. When they have almost become raisins,
they are pressed. The must is heavily charged with sugar, and ferments
powerfully. Wine thus made requires several years to ripen. Sweet at
first, it takes at last a very fine quality and flavour, and is rough, almost
acid, on the tongue. Its colour too turns from a deep rich crimson to the
tone of tawny port, which indeed it much resembles.
Old Forzato, which has been long in cask, and then perhaps three years
in bottle, will fetch at least six francs, or may rise to even ten francs a
flask. The best Sassella rarely reaches more than five francs. Good
Montagner and Grumello can be had perhaps for four francs; and
Inferno of a special quality for six francs. Thus the average price of old
Valtelline wine may be taken as five francs a bottle. These, I should
observe, are hotel prices.
Valtelline wines bought in the wood vary, of course, according to their
age and year of vintage. I have found that from 2.50 fr. to 3.50 fr. per
litre is a fair price for sorts fit to bottle. The new wine of 1881 sold in
the following winter at prices varying from 1.05 fr. to 1.80 fr. per litre.
It is customary for the Graubünden wine-merchants to buy up the
whole produce of a vineyard from the peasants at the end of the vintage.
They go in person or depute their agents to inspect the wine, make their
bargains, and seal the cellars where the wine is stored. Then, when the
snow has fallen, their own horses with sleighs and trusted servants go
across the passes to bring it home. Generally they have some local man
of confidence at Tirano, the starting-point for the homeward journey,
who takes the casks up to that place and sees them duly charged.
Merchants of old standing maintain relations with the same peasants,
taking their wine regularly; so that from Lorenz Gredig at Pontresina or
Andreas Gredig at Davos Dörfli, from Fanconi at Samaden, or from
Giacomi at Chiavenna, special qualities of wine, the produce of certain
vineyards, are to be obtained. Up to the present time this wine trade has
been conducted with simplicity and honesty by both the dealers and the
growers. One chief merit of Valtelline wine is that it is pure. How long
so desirable a state of things will survive the slow but steady
development of an export business may be questioned.
III
With so much practical and theoretical interest in the produce of the
Valtelline to stimulate my curiosity, I determined to visit the district at
the season when the wine was leaving it. It was the winter of 1881-82,
a winter of unparalleled beauty in the high Alps. Day succeeded day
without a cloud. Night followed night with steady stars, gliding across
clear mountain ranges and forests of dark pines unstirred by wind. I
could not hope for a more prosperous season; and indeed I made such
use of it, that between the months of January and March I crossed six
passes of the Alps in open sleighs--the Fluela Bernina, Splügen, Julier,
Maloja, and Albula--with less difficulty and discomfort in mid-winter
than the traveller may often find on them in June.
At the end of January, my friend Christian and I left Davos long before
the sun was up, and ascended for four hours through the interminable
snow-drifts of the Fluela in a cold grey shadow. The sun's light seemed
to elude us. It ran along the ravine through which we toiled; dipped
down to touch the topmost pines above our heads; rested in golden
calm upon the Schiahorn at our back; capriciously played here and
there across the Weisshorn on our left, and made the precipices of the
Schwartzhorn glitter on our right. But athwart our path it never fell
until we reached the very summit of the pass. Then we passed quietly
into the full glory of the winter morning--a tranquil flood of sunbeams,
pouring through air of crystalline purity, frozen and motionless. White
peaks and dark brown rocks soared up, cutting a sky of almost purple
blueness. A stillness that might be felt brooded over the whole world;
but in that stillness there was nothing sad, no suggestion of suspended
vitality. It was the stillness rather of untroubled health, of strength
omnipotent but unexerted.
From the Hochspitz of the Fluela the track plunges at one bound into
the valley of the Inn, following a narrow cornice carved from the
smooth bank of snow, and hung, without break or barrier, a thousand
feet or more above the torrent. The summer road is lost in snow-drifts.
The galleries built as a protection from avalanches, which sweep in
rivers from those grim, bare fells above, are blocked with snow. Their
useless arches yawn, as we glide over or outside them, by paths which
instinct in our horse and driver traces. As a fly may creep along a
house-roof, slanting downwards we descend. One whisk from the
swinged tail of an avalanche would hurl us, like a fly, into the ruin of
the gaping gorge. But this season little snow has fallen on the higher
hills; and what still lies there, is hard frozen. Therefore we have no fear,
as we whirl fast and faster from the snow-fields into the black forests of
gnarled cembras and wind-wearied pines. Then Süss is reached, where
the Inn hurries its shallow waters clogged with ice-floes through a
sleepy hamlet. The stream is pure and green; for the fountains of the
glaciers are locked by winter frosts; and only clear rills from perennial
sources swell its tide. At Süss we lost the sun, and toiled in garish
gloom and silence, nipped by the ever-deepening cold of evening,
upwards for four hours to Samaden.
The next day was spent in visiting the winter colony at San Moritz,
where the Kulm Hotel, tenanted by some twenty guests, presented in its
vastness the appearance of a country-house. One of the prettiest spots
in the world is the ice-rink, fashioned by the skill of Herr Caspar
Badrutt on a high raised terrace, commanding the valley of the Inn and
the ponderous bulwarks of Bernina. The silhouettes of skaters, defined
against that landscape of pure white, passed to and fro beneath a
cloudless sky. Ladies sat and worked or read on seats upon the ice. Not
a breath of wind was astir, and warm beneficent sunlight flooded the
immeasurable air. Only, as the day declined, some iridescent films
overspread the west; and just above Maloja the apparition of a mock
sun--a well-defined circle of opaline light, broken at regular intervals
by four globes--seemed to portend a change of weather. This forecast
fortunately proved delusive. We drove back to Samaden across the
silent snow, enjoying those delicate tints of rose and violet and saffron
which shed enchantment for one hour over the white monotony of
Alpine winter.
At half-past eight next morning, the sun was rising from behind Pitz
Languard, as we crossed the Inn and drove through Pontresina in the
glorious light, with all its huge hotels quite empty and none but a few
country-folk abroad. Those who only know the Engadine in summer
have little conception of its beauty. Winter softens the hard details of
bare rock, and rounds the melancholy grassless mountain flanks,
suspending icicles to every ledge and spangling the curved surfaces of
snow with crystals. The landscape gains in purity, and, what sounds
unbelievable, in tenderness. Nor does it lose in grandeur. Looking up
the valley of the Morteratsch that morning, the glaciers were
distinguishable in hues of green and sapphire through their veil of snow;
and the highest peaks soared in a transparency of amethystine light
beneath a blue sky traced with filaments of windy cloud. Some storm
must have disturbed the atmosphere in Italy, for fan-shaped mists
frothed out around the sun, and curled themselves above the mountains
in fine feathery wreaths, melting imperceptibly into air, until, when we
had risen above the cembras, the sky was one deep solid blue.
All that upland wilderness is lovelier now than in the summer; and on
the morning of which I write, the air itself was far more summery than I
have ever known it in the Engadine in August. We could scarcely bear
to place our hands upon the woodwork of the sleigh because of the
fierce sun's heat. And yet the atmosphere was crystalline with windless
frost. As though to increase the strangeness of these contrasts, the
pavement of beaten snow was stained with red drops spilt from
wine-casks which pass over it.
The chief feature of the Bernina--what makes it a dreary pass enough in
summer, but infinitely beautiful in winter--is its breadth; illimitable
undulations of snow-drifts; immensity of open sky; unbroken lines of
white, descending in smooth curves from glittering ice-peaks.
A glacier hangs in air above the frozen lakes, with all its green-blue
ice-cliffs glistening in intensest light. Pitz Palu shoots aloft like
sculptured marble, delicately veined with soft aërial shadows of
translucent blue. At the summit of the pass all Italy seems to burst upon
the eyes in those steep serried ranges, with their craggy crests,
violet-hued in noonday sunshine, as though a bloom of plum or grape
had been shed over them, enamelling their jagged precipices.
The top of the Bernina is not always thus in winter. It has a bad
reputation for the fury of invading storms, when falling snow hurtles
together with snow scooped from the drifts in eddies, and the weltering
white sea shifts at the will of whirlwinds. The Hospice then may be
tenanted for days together by weather-bound wayfarers; and a line
drawn close beneath its roof shows how two years ago the whole
building was buried in one snow-shroud. This morning we lounged
about the door, while our horses rested and postillions and carters
pledged one another in cups of new Veltliner.
The road takes an awful and sudden dive downwards, quite irrespective
of the carefully engineered post-track. At this season the path is badly
broken into ruts and chasms by the wine traffic. In some places it was
indubitably perilous: a narrow ledge of mere ice skirting thinly clad
hard-frozen banks of snow, which fell precipitately sideways for
hundreds of sheer feet. We did not slip over this parapet, though we
were often within an inch of doing so. Had our horse stumbled, it is not
probable that I should have been writing this.
When we came to the galleries which defend the road from avalanches,
we saw ahead of us a train of over forty sledges ascending, all charged
with Valtelline wine. Our postillions drew up at the inner side of the
gallery, between massive columns of the purest ice dependent from the
rough-hewn roof and walls of rock. A sort of open loggia on the farther
side framed vignettes of the Valtelline mountains in their hard cerulean
shadows and keen sunlight. Between us and the view defiled the
wine-sledges; and as each went by, the men made us drink out of their
trinketti. These are oblong, hexagonal wooden kegs, holding about
fourteen litres, which the carter fills with wine before he leaves the
Valtelline, to cheer him on the homeward journey. You raise it in both
hands, and when the bung has been removed, allow the liquor to flow
stream-wise down your throat. It was a most extraordinary Bacchic
procession--a pomp which, though undreamed of on the banks of the
Ilissus, proclaimed the deity of Dionysos in authentic fashion.
Struggling horses, grappling at the ice-bound floor with sharp-spiked
shoes; huge, hoarse drivers, some clad in sheepskins from Italian
valleys, some brown as bears in rough Graubünden homespun; casks,
dropping their spilth of red wine on the snow; greetings, embracings;
patois of Bergamo, Romansch, and German roaring around the
low-browed vaults and tingling ice pillars; pourings forth of libations of
the new strong Valtelline on breasts and beards;--the whole made up a
scene of stalwart jollity and manful labour such as I have nowhere else
in such wild circumstances witnessed. Many Davosers were there, the
men of Andreas Gredig, Valär, and so forth; and all of these, on
greeting Christian, forced us to drain a Schluck from their
unmanageable cruses. Then on they went, crying, creaking, struggling,
straining through the corridor, which echoed deafeningly, the gleaming
crystals of those hard Italian mountains in their winter raiment building
a background of still beauty to the savage Bacchanalian riot of the
team.
How little the visitors who drink Valtelline wine at S. Moritz or Davos
reflect by what strange ways it reaches them. A sledge can scarcely be
laden with more than one cask of 300 litres on the ascent; and this cask,
according to the state of the road, has many times to be shifted from
wheels to runners and back again before the journey is accomplished.
One carter will take charge of two horses, and consequently of two
sledges and two casks, driving them both by voice and gesture rather
than by rein. When they leave the Valtelline, the carters endeavour, as
far as possible, to take the pass in gangs, lest bad weather or an
accident upon the road should overtake them singly. At night they
hardly rest three hours, and rarely think of sleeping, but spend the time
in drinking and conversation. The horses are fed and littered; but for
them too the night-halt is little better than a baiting-time. In fair
weather the passage of the mountain is not difficult, though tiring. But
woe to men and beasts alike if they encounter storms! Not a few perish
in the passes; and it frequently happens that their only chance is to
unyoke the horses and leave the sledges in a snow-wreath, seeking for
themselves such shelter as may possibly be gained, frost-bitten, after
hours of battling with impermeable drifts. The wine is frozen into one
solid mass of rosy ice before it reaches Pontresina. This does not hurt
the young vintage, but it is highly injurious to wine of some years'
standing. The perils of the journey are aggravated by the savage temper
of the drivers. Jealousies between the natives of rival districts spring up;
and there are men alive who have fought the whole way down from
Fluela Hospice to Davos Platz with knives and stones, hammers and
hatchets, wooden staves and splintered cart-wheels, staining the snow
with blood, and bringing broken pates, bruised limbs, and senseless
comrades home to their women to be tended.
Bacchus Alpinus shepherded his train away from us to northward, and
we passed forth into noonday from the gallery. It then seemed clear that
both conductor and postillion were sufficiently merry. The plunge they
took us down those frozen parapets, with shriek and jauchzen and
cracked whips, was more than ever dangerous. Yet we reached La Rosa
safely. This is a lovely solitary spot, beside a rushing stream, among
grey granite boulders grown with spruce and rhododendron: a veritable
rose of Sharon blooming in the desert. The wastes of the Bernina
stretch above, and round about are leaguered some of the most
forbidding sharp-toothed peaks I ever saw. Onwards, across the silent
snow, we glided in immitigable sunshine, through opening valleys and
pine-woods, past the robber-huts of Pisciadella, until at evenfall we
rested in the roadside inn at Poschiavo.
IV
The snow-path ended at Poschiavo; and when, as usual, we started on
our journey next day at sunrise, it was in a carriage upon wheels. Yet
even here we were in full midwinter. Beyond Le Prese the lake
presented one sheet of smooth black ice, reflecting every peak and
chasm of the mountains, and showing the rocks and water-weeds in the
clear green depths below. The glittering floor stretched away for acres
of untenanted expanse, with not a skater to explore those dark
mysterious coves, or strike across the slanting sunlight poured from
clefts in the impendent hills. Inshore the substance of the ice sparkled
here and there with iridescence like the plumelets of a butterfly's wing
under the microscope, wherever light happened to catch the jagged or
oblique flaws that veined its solid crystal.
From the lake the road descends suddenly for a considerable distance
through a narrow gorge, following a torrent which rushes among
granite boulders. Chestnut trees begin to replace the pines. The sunnier
terraces are planted with tobacco, and at a lower level vines appear at
intervals in patches. One comes at length to a great red gate across the
road, which separates Switzerland from Italy, and where the export
dues on wine are paid. The Italian custom-house is romantically
perched above the torrent. Two courteous and elegant finanzieri, mere
boys, were sitting wrapped in their military cloaks and reading novels
in the sun as we drove up. Though they made some pretence of
examining the luggage, they excused themselves with sweet smiles and
apologetic eyes--it was a disagreeable duty!
A short time brought us to the first village in the Valtelline, where the
road bifurcates northward to Bormio and the Stelvio pass, southward to
Sondrio and Lombardy. It is a little hamlet, known by the name of La
Madonna di Tirano, having grown up round a pilgrimage church of
great beauty, with tall Lombard bell-tower, pierced with many tiers of
pilastered windows, ending in a whimsical spire, and dominating a
fantastic cupola building of the earlier Renaissance. Taken altogether,
this is a charming bit of architecture, picturesquely set beneath the
granite snow-peaks of the Valtelline. The church, they say, was raised
at Madonna's own command to stay the tide of heresy descending from
the Engadine; and in the year 1620, the bronze statue of S. Michael,
which still spreads wide its wings above the cupola, looked down upon
the massacre of six hundred Protestants and foreigners, commanded by
the patriot Jacopo Robustelli.
From Madonna the road leads up the valley through a narrow avenue of
poplar-trees to the town of Tirano. We were now in the district where
Forzato is made, and every vineyard had a name and history. In Tirano
we betook ourself to the house of an old acquaintance of the Buol
family, Bernardo da Campo, or, as the Graubündeners call him,
Bernard Campbèll. We found him at dinner with his son and
grandchildren in a vast, dark, bare Italian chamber. It would be difficult
to find a more typical old Scotchman of the Lowlands than he looked,
with his clean close-shaven face, bright brown eyes, and snow-white
hair escaping from a broad-brimmed hat. He might have sat to a painter
for some Covenanter's portrait, except that there was nothing dour
about him, or for an illustration to Burns's 'Cotter's Saturday Night.'
The air of probity and canniness combined with a twinkle of dry
humour was completely Scotch; and when he tapped his snuff-box,
telling stories of old days, I could not refrain from asking him about his
pedigree. It should be said that there is a considerable family of
Campèlls or Campbèlls in the Graubünden, who are fabled to deduce
their stock from a Scotch Protestant of Zwingli's time; and this made it
irresistible to imagine that in our friend Bernardo I had chanced upon a
notable specimen of atavism. All he knew, however, was, that his first
ancestor had been a foreigner, who came across the mountains to
Tirano two centuries ago.[3]
This old gentleman is a considerable wine-dealer. He sent us with his
son, Giacomo, on a long journey underground through his cellars,
where we tasted several sorts of Valtelline, especially the new Forzato,
made a few weeks since, which singularly combines sweetness with
strength, and both with a slight effervescence. It is certainly the sort of
wine wherewith to tempt a Polyphemus, and not unapt to turn a giant's
head.
Leaving Tirano, and once more passing through the poplars by
Madonna, we descended the valley all along the vineyards of Villa and
the vast district of Sassella. Here and there, at wayside inns, we stopped
to drink a glass of some particular vintage; and everywhere it seemed
as though god Bacchus were at home. The whole valley on the right
side of the Adda is one gigantic vineyard, climbing the hills in tiers and
terraces, which justify its Italian epithet of Teatro di Bacco. The rock is
a greyish granite, assuming sullen brown and orange tints where
exposed to sun and weather. The vines are grown on stakes, not
trellised over trees or carried across boulders, as is the fashion at
Chiavenna or Terlan. Yet every advantage of the mountain is adroitly
used; nooks and crannies being specially preferred, where the sun's rays
are deflected from hanging cliffs. The soil seems deep, and is of a dull
yellow tone. When the vines end, brushwood takes up the growth,
which expires at last in crag and snow. Some alps and chalets, dimly
traced against the sky, are evidences that a pastoral life prevails above
the vineyards. Pan there stretches the pine-thyrsus down to
vine-garlanded Dionysos.
The Adda flows majestically among willows in the midst, and the
valley is nearly straight. The prettiest spot, perhaps, is at Tresenda or S.
Giacomo, where a pass from Edolo and Brescia descends from the
southern hills. But the Valtelline has no great claim to beauty of
scenery. Its chief town, Sondrio, where we supped and drank some
special wine called il vino de' Signori Grigioni, has been modernised in
dull Italian fashion.
V
The hotel at Sondrio, La Maddalena, was in carnival uproar of
masquers, topers, and musicians all night through. It was as much as
we could do to rouse the sleepy servants and get a cup of coffee ere we
started in the frozen dawn. 'Verfluchte Maddalena!' grumbled Christian
as he shouldered our portmanteaus and bore them in hot haste to the
post. Long experience only confirms the first impression, that, of all
cold, the cold of an Italian winter is most penetrating. As we lumbered
out of Sondrio in a heavy diligence, I could have fancied myself back
once again at Radicofani or among the Ciminian hills. The frost was
penetrating. Fur-coats would not keep it out; and we longed to be once
more in open sledges on Bernina rather than enclosed in that cold
coupé. Now we passed Grumello, the second largest of the renowned
vine districts; and always keeping the white mass of Monte di
Disgrazia in sight, rolled at last into Morbegno. Here the Valtelline
vintage properly ends, though much of the ordinary wine is probably
supplied from the inferior produce of these fields. It was past noon
when we reached Colico, and saw the Lake of Como glittering in
sunlight, dazzling cloaks of snow on all the mountains, which look as
dry and brown as dead beech-leaves at this season. Our Bacchic
journey had reached its close; and it boots not here to tell in detail how
we made our way across the Splügen, piercing its avalanches by
low-arched galleries scooped from the solid snow, and careering in our
sledges down perpendicular snow-fields, which no one who has crossed
that pass from the Italian side in winter will forget. We left the refuge
station at the top together with a train of wine-sledges, and passed them
in the midst of the wild descent. Looking back, I saw two of their
horses stumble in the plunge and roll headlong over. Unluckily in one
of these somersaults a man was injured. Flung ahead into the snow by
the first lurch, the sledge and wine-cask crossed him like a
garden-roller. Had his bed not been of snow, he must have been
crushed to death; and as it was, he presented a woeful appearance when
he afterwards arrived at Splügen.
VI
Though not strictly connected with the subject of this paper, I shall
conclude these notes of winter wanderings in the high Alps with an
episode which illustrates their curious vicissitudes.
It was late in the month of March, and nearly all the mountain roads
were open for wheeled vehicles. A carriage and four horses came to
meet us at the termination of a railway journey in Bagalz. We spent one
day in visiting old houses of the Grisons aristocracy at Mayenfeld and
Zizers, rejoicing in the early sunshine, which had spread the fields with
spring flowers--primroses and oxlips, violets, anemones, and bright
blue squills. At Chur we slept, and early next morning started for our
homeward drive to Davos. Bad weather had declared itself in the night.
It blew violently, and the rain soon changed to snow, frozen by a bitter
north blast. Crossing the dreary heath of Lenz was both magnificent
and dreadful. By the time we reached Wiesen, all the forests were laden
with snow, the roads deep in snow-drifts, the whole scene wintrier than
it had been the winter through.
At Wiesen we should have stayed, for evening was fast setting in. But
in ordinary weather it is only a two hours drive from Wiesen to Davos.
Our coachman made no objections to resuming the journey, and our
four horses had but a light load to drag. So we telegraphed for supper to
be prepared, and started between five and six.
A deep gorge has to be traversed, where the torrent cleaves its way
between jaws of limestone precipices. The road is carried along ledges
and through tunnels in the rock. Avalanches, which sweep this passage
annually from the hills above, give it the name of Züge, or the
Snow-Paths. As we entered the gorge darkness fell, the horses dragged
more heavily, and it soon became evident that our Tyrolese driver was
hopelessly drunk. He nearly upset us twice by taking sharp turns in the
road, banged the carriage against telegraph posts and jutting rocks,
shaved the very verge of the torrent in places where there was no
parapet, and, what was worst of all, refused to leave his box without a
fight. The darkness by this time was all but total, and a blinding
snow-storm swept howling through the ravine. At length we got the
carriage to a dead-stop, and floundered out in deep wet snow toward
some wooden huts where miners in old days made their habitation. The
place, by a curious, perhaps unconscious irony, is called Hoffnungsau,
or the Meadow of Hope. Indeed, it is not ill named; for many wanderers,
escaping, as we did, from the dreadful gorge of Avalanches on a stormy
night, may have felt, as we now felt, their hope reviving when they
reached this shelter.
There was no light; nothing above, beneath, around, on any side, but
tearing tempest and snow whirled through the ravine. The horses were
taken out of the carriage; on their way to the stable, which fortunately
in these mountain regions will be always found beside the poorest
habitation, one of them fell back across a wall and nearly broke his
spine. Hoffnungsau is inhabited all through the year. In its dismal dark
kitchen we found a knot of workmen gathered together, and heard there
were two horses on the premises besides our own. It then occurred to us
that we might accomplish the rest of the journey with such sledges as
they bring the wood on from the hills in winter, if coal-boxes or boxes
of any sort could be provided. These should be lashed to the sledges
and filled with hay. We were only four persons; my wife and a friend
should go in one, myself and my little girl in the other. No sooner
thought of than put into practice. These original conveyances were
improvised, and after two hours' halt on the Meadow of Hope, we all
set forth again at half-past eight.
I have rarely felt anything more piercing than the grim cold of that
journey. We crawled at a foot's pace through changeful snow-drifts.
The road was obliterated, and it was my duty to keep a petroleum
stable-lamp swinging to illuminate the untracked wilderness. My little
girl was snugly nested in the hay, and sound asleep with a deep white
covering of snow above her. Meanwhile, the drift clave in frozen
masses to our faces, lashed by a wind so fierce and keen that it was
difficult to breathe it. My forehead-bone ached, as though with
neuralgia, from the mere mask of icy snow upon it, plastered on with
frost. Nothing could be seen but millions of white specks, whirled at us
in eddying concentric circles. Not far from the entrance to the village
we met our house-folk out with lanterns to look for us. It was past
eleven at night when at last we entered warm rooms and refreshed
ourselves for the tiring day with a jovial champagne supper. Horses,
carriage, and drunken driver reached home next morning.
*****
OLD TOWNS OF PROVENCE
Travellers journeying southward from Paris first meet with olive-trees
near Montdragon or Monsélimart--little towns, with old historic names,
upon the road to Orange. It is here that we begin to feel ourselves
within the land of Provence, where the Romans found a second Italy,
and where the autumn of their antique civilisation was followed, almost
without an intermediate winter of barbarism, by the light and delicate
springtime of romance. Orange itself is full of Rome. Indeed, the ghost
of the dead empire seems there to be more real and living than the
actual flesh and blood of modern time, as represented by narrow dirty
streets and mean churches. It is the shell of the huge theatre, hollowed
from the solid hill, and fronted with a wall that seems made rather to
protect a city than to form a sounding-board for a stage, which first tells
us that we have reached the old Arausio. Of all theatres this is the most
impressive, stupendous, indestructible, the Colosseum hardly excepted;
for in Rome herself we are prepared for something gigantic, while in
the insignificant Arausio--a sort of antique Tewkesbury--to find such
magnificence, durability, and vastness, impresses one with a nightmare
sense that the old lioness of Empire can scarcely yet be dead. Standing
before the colossal, towering, amorphous precipice which formed the
background of the scena, we feel as if once more the 'heart-shaking
sound of Consul Romanus' might be heard; as if Roman knights and
deputies, arisen from the dead, with faces hard and stern as those of the
warriors carved on Trajan's frieze, might take their seats beneath us in
the orchestra, and, after proclamation made, the mortmain of imperial
Rome be laid upon the comforts, liberties, and little gracefulnesses of
our modern life. Nor is it unpleasant to be startled from such reverie by
the voice of the old guardian upon the stage beneath, sonorously
devolving the vacuous Alexandrines with which he once welcomed his
ephemeral French emperor from Algiers. The little man is dim with
distance, eclipsed and swallowed up by the shadows and grotesque
fragments of the ruin in the midst of which he stands. But his
voice--thanks to the inimitable constructive art of the ancient architect,
which, even in the desolation of at least thirteen centuries, has not lost
its cunning-emerges from the pigmy throat, and fills the whole vast
hollow with its clear, if tiny, sound. Thank heaven, there is no danger
of Roman resurrection here! The illusion is completely broken, and we
turn to gather the first violets of February, and to wonder at the quaint
postures of a praying mantis on the grass grown tiers and porches
fringed with fern.
The sense of Roman greatness which is so oppressive in Orange and in
many other parts of Provence, is not felt at Avignon. Here we exchange
the ghost of Imperial for the phantom of Ecclesiastical Rome. The fixed
epithet of Avignon is Papal; and as the express train rushes over its
bleak and wind-tormented plain, the heavy dungeon-walls and
battlemented towers of its palace fortress seem to warn us off, and bid
us quickly leave the Babylon of exiled impious Antichrist. Avignon
presents the bleakest, barest, greyest scene upon a February morning,
when the incessant mistral is blowing, and far and near, upon desolate
hillside and sandy plain, the scanty trees are bent sideways, the
crumbling castle turrets shivering like bleached skeletons in the dry
ungenial air. Yet inside the town, all is not so dreary. The Papal palace,
with its terrible Glacière, its chapel painted by Simone Memmi, its
endless corridors and staircases, its torture-chamber, funnel-shaped to
drown and suffocate--so runs tradition--the shrieks of wretches on the
rack, is now a barrack, filled with lively little French soldiers, whose
politeness, though sorely taxed, is never ruffled by the introduction of
inquisitive visitors into their dormitories, eating-places, and
drill-grounds. And strange, indeed, it is to see the lines of neat narrow
barrack beds, between which the red-legged little men are shaving,
polishing their guns, or mending their trousers, in those vaulted halls of
popes and cardinals, those vast presence-chambers and
audience-galleries, where Urban entertained S. Catherine, where Rienzi
came, a prisoner, to be stared at. Pass by the Glacière with a shudder,
for it has still the reek of blood about it; and do not long delay in the
cheerless dungeon of Rienzi. Time and regimental whitewash have
swept these lurking-places of old crime very bare; but the parable of the
seven devils is true in more senses than one, and the ghosts that return
to haunt a deodorised, disinfected, garnished sepulchre are almost more
ghastly than those which have never been disturbed from their old
habitations.
Little by little the eye becomes accustomed to the bareness and
greyness of this Provençal landscape; and then we find that the scenery
round Avignon is eminently picturesque. The view from Les
Doms--which is a hill above the Pope's palace, the Acropolis, as it were,
of Avignon--embraces a wide stretch of undulating champaign,
bordered by low hills, and intersected by the flashing waters of the
majestic Rhone. Across the stream stands Villeneuve, like a castle of
romance, with its round stone towers fronting the gates and
battlemented walls of the Papal city. A bridge used to connect the two
towns, but it is now broken. The remaining fragment is of solid build,
resting on great buttresses, one of which rises fantastically above the
bridge into a little chapel. Such, one might fancy, was the bridge which
Ariosto's Rodomonte kept on horse against the Paladins of
Charlemagne, when angered by the loss of his love. Nor is it difficult to
imagine Bradamante spurring up the slope against him with her magic
lance in rest, and tilting him into the tawny waves beneath.
On a clear October morning, when the vineyards are taking their last
tints of gold and crimson, and the yellow foliage of the poplars by the
river mingles with the sober greys of olive-trees and willows, every
square inch of this landscape, glittering as it does with light and with
colour, the more beautiful for its subtlety and rarity, would make a
picture. Out of many such vignettes let us choose one. We are on the
shore close by the ruined bridge, the rolling muddy Rhone in front;
beyond it, by the towing-path, a tall strong cypress-tree rises beside a
little house, and next to it a crucifix twelve feet or more in height, the
Christ visible afar, stretched upon His red cross; arundo donax is
waving all around, and willows near; behind, far off, soar the peaked
hills, blue and pearled with clouds; past the cypress, on the Rhone,
comes floating a long raft, swift through the stream, its rudder guided
by a score of men: one standing erect upon the prow bends forward to
salute the cross; on flies the raft, the tall reeds rustle, and the cypress
sleeps.
For those who have time to spare in going to or from the south it is
worth while to spend a day or two in the most comfortable and
characteristic of old French inns, the Hôtel de l'Europe, at Avignon.
Should it rain, the museum of the town is worth a visit. It contains
Horace Vernet's not uncelebrated picture of Mazeppa, and another, less
famous, but perhaps more interesting, by swollen-cheeked David, the
'genius in convulsion,' as Carlyle has christened him. His canvas is
unfinished. Who knows what cry of the Convention made the painter
fling his palette down and leave the masterpiece he might have spoiled?
For in its way the picture is a masterpiece. There lies Jean Barrad,
drummer, aged fourteen, slain in La Vendée, a true patriot, who, while
his life-blood flowed away, pressed the tricolor cockade to his heart,
and murmured 'Liberty!' David has treated his subject classically. The
little drummer-boy, though French enough in feature and in feeling, lies,
Greek-like, naked on the sand--a very Hyacinth of the Republic, La
Vendée's Ilioneus. The tricolor cockade and the sentiment of upturned
patriotic eyes are the only indications of his being a hero in his teens, a
citizen who thought it sweet to die for France.
In fine weather a visit to Vaucluse should by no means be omitted, not
so much, perhaps, for Petrarch's sake as for the interest of the drive, and
for the marvel of the fountain of the Sorgues. For some time after
leaving Avignon you jog along the level country between avenues of
plane-trees; then comes a hilly ridge, on which the olives, mulberries,
and vineyards join their colours and melt subtly into distant purple.
After crossing this we reach L'Isle, an island village girdled by the
gliding Sorgues, overshadowed with gigantic plane-boughs, and
echoing to the plash of water dripped from mossy fern-tufted
millwheels. Those who expect Petrarch's Sorgues to be some trickling
poet's rill emerging from a damp grotto, may well be astounded at the
rush and roar of this azure river so close upon its fountain-head. It has a
volume and an arrow-like rapidity that communicate the feeling of
exuberance and life. In passing, let it not be forgotten that it was
somewhere or other in this 'chiaro fondo di Sorga,' as Carlyle describes,
that Jourdain, the hangman-hero of the Glacière, stuck fast upon his
pony when flying from his foes, and had his accursed life, by some
diabolical providence, spared for future butcheries. On we go across the
austere plain, between fields of madder, the red roots of the 'garance'
lying in swathes along the furrows. In front rise ash-grey hills of barren
rock, here and there crimsoned with the leaves of the dwarf sumach. A
huge cliff stands up and seems to bar all passage. Yet the river foams in
torrents at our side. Whence can it issue? What pass or cranny in that
precipice is cloven for its escape? These questions grow in interest as
we enter the narrow defile of limestone rocks which leads to the
cliff-barrier, and find ourselves among the figs and olives of Vaucluse.
Here is the village, the little church, the ugly column to Petrarch's
memory, the inn, with its caricatures of Laura, and its excellent trout,
the bridge and the many-flashing, eddying Sorgues, lashed by
millwheels, broken by weirs, divided in its course, channelled and
dyked, yet flowing irresistibly and undefiled. Blue, purple, greened by
moss and water-weeds, silvered by snow-white pebbles, on its pure
smooth bed the river runs like elemental diamond, so clear and fresh.
The rocks on either side are grey or yellow, terraced into oliveyards,
with here and there a cypress, fig, or mulberry tree. Soon the gardens
cease, and lentisk, rosemary, box, and ilex--shrubs of Provence--with
here and there a sumach out of reach, cling to the hard stone. And so at
last we are brought face to face with the sheer impassable precipice. At
its basement sleeps a pool, perfectly untroubled; a lakelet in which the
sheltering rocks and nestling wild figs are glassed as in a mirror--a
mirror of blue-black water, like amethyst or fluor-spar--so pure, so still,
that where it laps the pebbles you can scarcely say where air begins and
water ends. This, then, is Petrarch's 'grotto;' this is the fountain of
Vaucluse. Up from its deep reservoirs, from the mysterious basements
of the mountain, wells the silent stream; pauseless and motionless it
fills its urn, rises unruffled, glides until the brink is reached, then
overflows, and foams, and dashes noisily, a cataract, among the
boulders of the hills. Nothing at Vaucluse is more impressive than the
contrast between the tranquil silence of the fountain and the roar of the
released impetuous river. Here we can realise the calm clear eyes of
sculptured water-gods, their brimming urns, their gushing streams, the
magic of the mountain-born and darkness-cradled flood. Or again,
looking up at the sheer steep cliff, 800 feet in height, and arching
slightly roofwise, so that no rain falls upon the cavern of the pool, we
seem to see the stroke of Neptune's trident, the hoof of Pegasus, the
force of Moses' rod, which cleft rocks and made water gush forth in the
desert. There is a strange fascination in the spot. As our eyes follow the
white pebble which cleaves the surface and falls visibly, until the veil
of azure is too thick for sight to pierce, we feel as if some glamour were
drawing us, like Hylas, to the hidden caves. At least, we long to yield a
prized and precious offering to the spring, to grace the nymph of
Vaucluse with a pearl of price as token of our reverence and love.
Meanwhile nothing has been said about Petrarch, who himself said
much about the spring, and complained against those very nymphs to
whom we have in wish, at least, been scattering jewels, that they broke
his banks and swallowed up his gardens every winter. At Vaucluse
Petrarch loved, and lived, and sang. He has made Vaucluse famous, and
will never be forgotten there. But for the present the fountain is even
more attractive than the memory of the poet.[4]
The change from Avignon to Nismes is very trying to the latter place;
for Nismes is not picturesquely or historically interesting. It is a
prosperous modern French town with two almost perfect Roman
monuments--Les Arènes and the Maison Carrée. The amphitheatre is a
complete oval, visible at one glance. Its smooth white stone, even
where it has not been restored, seems unimpaired by age; and Charles
Martel's conflagration, when he burned the Saracen hornet's nest inside
it, has only blackened the outer walls and arches venerably. Utility and
perfect adaptation of means to ends form the beauty of Roman
buildings. The science of construction and large intelligence displayed
in them, their strength, simplicity, solidity, and purpose, are their glory.
Perhaps there is only one modern edifice--Palladio's Palazzo della
Ragione at Vicenza--which approaches the dignity and loftiness of
Roman architecture; and this it does because of its absolute freedom
from ornament, the vastness of its design, and the durability of its
material. The temple, called the Maison Carrée, at Nismes, is also very
perfect, and comprehended at one glance. Light, graceful, airy, but
rather thin and narrow, it reminds one of the temple of Fortuna Virilis
at Rome.
But if Nismes itself is not picturesque, its environs contain the
wonderful Pont du Gard. A two or three hours' drive leads through a
desolate country to the valley of the Cardon, where suddenly, at a turn
of the road, one comes upon the aqueduct. It is not within the scope of
words to describe the impression produced by those vast arches, row
above row, cutting the deep blue sky. The domed summer clouds
sailing across them are comprehended in the gigantic span of their
perfect semicircles, which seem rather to have been described by
Miltonic compasses of Deity than by merely human mathematics. Yet,
standing beneath one of the vaults and looking upward, you may read
Roman numerals in order from I. to X., which prove their human origin
well enough. Next to their strength, regularity, and magnitude, the most
astonishing point about this triple tier of arches, piled one above the
other to a height of 180 feet above a brawling stream between two
barren hills, is their lightness. The arches are not thick; the causeway
on the top is only just broad enough for three men to walk abreast. So
smooth and perpendicular are the supporting walls that scarcely a shrub
or tuft of grass has grown upon the aqueduct in all these years. And yet
the huge fabric is strengthened by no buttress, has needed no repair.
This lightness of structure, combined with such prodigious durability,
produces the strongest sense of science and self-reliant power in the
men who designed it. None but Romans could have built such a
monument, and have set it in such a place--a wilderness of rock and
rolling hill, scantily covered with low brushwood, and browsed over by
a few sheep--for such a purpose, too, in order to supply Nemausus with
pure water. The modern town does pretty well without its water; but
here subsists the civilisation of eighteen centuries past intact: the
human labour yet remains, the measuring, contriving mind of man,
shrinking from no obstacles, spanning the air, and in one edifice
combining gigantic strength and perfect beauty. It is impossible not to
echo Rousseau's words in such a place, and to say with him: 'Le
retentissement de mes pas dans ces immenses voûtes me faisait croire
entendre la forte voix de ceux qui les avaient bâties. Je me perdais
comme un insecte dans cette immensité. Je sentais, tout en me faisant
petit, je ne sais quoi qui m'élevait l'âme; et je me disais en soupirant,
Que ne suis-je né Romain!'
There is nothing at Arles which produces the same deep and indelible
impression. Yet Arles is a far more interesting town than Nismes,
partly because of the Rhone delta which begins there, partly because of
its ruinous antiquity, and partly also because of the strong local
character of its population. The amphitheatre of Arles is vaster and
more sublime in its desolation than the tidy theatre at Nismes; the
crypts, and dens, and subterranean passages suggest all manner of
speculation as to the uses to which they may have been appropriated;
while the broken galleries outside, intricate and black and cavernous,
like Piranesi's etchings of the 'Carceri,' present the wildest pictures of
greatness in decay, fantastic dilapidation. The ruins of the smaller
theatre, again, with their picturesquely grouped fragments and their
standing columns, might be sketched for a frontispiece to some
dilettante work on classical antiquities. For the rest, perhaps the
Aliscamps, or ancient Roman burial-ground, is the most interesting
thing at Arles, not only because of Dante's celebrated lines in the canto
of 'Farinata:'-Si come ad Arli ove 'l Rodano stagna, Fanno i sepolcri tutto 'l loco
varo;
but also because of the intrinsic picturesqueness of this avenue of
sepulchres beneath green trees upon a long soft grassy field.
But as at Avignon and Nismes, so also at Arles, one of the chief
attractions of the place lies at a distance, and requires a special
expedition. The road to Les Baux crosses a true Provençal desert where
one realises the phrase, 'Vieux comme les rochers de Provence,'--a
wilderness of grey stone, here and there worn into cart-tracks, and
tufted with rosemary, box, lavender, and lentisk. On the way it passes
the Abbaye de Mont Majeur, a ruin of gigantic size, embracing all
periods of architecture; where nothing seems to flourish now but
henbane and the wild cucumber, or to breathe but a mumble-toothed
and terrible old hag. The ruin stands above a desolate marsh, its vast
Italian buildings of Palladian splendour looking more forlorn in their
decay than the older and austerer mediæval towers, which rise up proud
and patient and defiantly erect beneath the curse of time. When at
length what used to be the castle town of Les Baux is reached, you find
a naked mountain of yellow sandstone, worn away by nature into
bastions and buttresses and coigns of vantage, sculptured by ancient art
into palaces and chapels, battlements and dungeons. Now art and nature
are confounded in one ruin. Blocks of masonry lie cheek by jowl with
masses of the rough-hewn rock; fallen cavern vaults are heaped round
fragments of fan-shaped spandrel and clustered column-shaft; the doors
and windows of old pleasure-rooms are hung with ivy and wild fig for
tapestry; winding staircases start midway upon the cliff, and lead to
vacancy. High overhead suspended in mid-air hang chambers--lady's
bower or poet's singing-room--now inaccessible, the haunt of hawks
and swallows. Within this rocky honeycomb--'cette ville en monolithe,'
as it has been aptly called, for it is literally scooped out of one
mountain block--live about two hundred poor people, foddering their
wretched goats at carved piscina and stately sideboards, erecting mud
beplastered hovels in the halls of feudal princes. Murray is wrong in
calling the place a mediæval town in its original state, for anything
more purely ruinous, more like a decayed old cheese, cannot possibly
be conceived. The living only inhabit the tombs of the dead. At the end
of the last century, when revolutionary effervescence was beginning to
ferment, the people of Arles swept all its feudality away, defacing the
very arms upon the town gate, and trampling the palace towers to dust.
The castle looks out across a vast extent of plain over Arles, the
stagnant Rhone, the Camargue, and the salt pools of the lingering sea.
In old days it was the eyrie of an eagle race called Seigneurs of Les
Baux; and whether they took their title from the rock, or whether, as
genealogists would have it, they gave the name of Oriental
Balthazar--their reputed ancestor, one of the Magi--to the rock itself,
remains a mystery not greatly worth the solving.
Anyhow, here they lived and flourished, these feudal princes, bearing
for their ensign a silver comet of sixteen rays upon a field of
gules--themselves a comet race, baleful to the neighbouring lowlands,
blazing with lurid splendour over wide tracts of country, a burning,
raging, fiery-souled, swift-handed tribe, in whom a flame unquenchable
glowed from son to sire through twice five hundred years until, in the
sixteenth century, they were burned out, and nothing remained but
cinders--these broken ruins of their eyrie, and some outworn and dusty
titles. Very strange are the fate and history of these same titles: King of
Arles, for instance, savouring of troubadour and high romance; Prince
of Tarentum, smacking of old plays and Italian novels; Prince of
Orange, which the Nassaus, through the Châlons, seized in all its
emptiness long after the real principality had passed away, and came
therewith to sit on England's throne.
The Les Baux in their heyday were patterns of feudal nobility. They
warred incessantly with Counts of Provence, archbishops and burghers
of Arles, Queens of Naples, Kings of Aragon. Crusading, pillaging,
betraying, spending their substance on the sword, and buying it again
by deeds of valour or imperial acts of favour, tuning troubadour harps,
presiding at courts of love,--they filled a large page in the history of
Southern France. The Les Baux were very superstitious. In the fulness
of their prosperity they restricted the number of their dependent towns,
or places baussenques, to seventy-nine, because these numbers in
combination were thought to be of good omen to their house. Beral des
Baux, Seigneur of Marseilles, was one day starting on a journey with
his whole force to Avignon. He met an old woman herb-gathering at
daybreak, and said, 'Mother, hast thou seen a crow or other bird?' 'Yea,'
answered the crone, 'on the trunk of a dead willow.' Beral counted upon
his fingers the day of the year, and turned bridle. With troubadours of
name and note they had dealings, but not always to their own
advantage, as the following story testifies. When the Baux and
Berengers were struggling for the countship of Provence, Raymond
Berenger, by his wife's counsel, went, attended by troubadours, to meet
the Emperor Frederick at Milan. There he sued for the investiture and
ratification of Provence. His troubadours sang and charmed Frederick;
and the Emperor, for the joy he had in them, wrote his celebrated lines
beginning-Plas mi cavalier Francez.
And when Berenger made his request he met with no refusal. Hearing
thereof, the lords of Baux came down in wrath with a clangour of
armed men. But music had already gained the day; and where the
Phoebus of Provence had shone, the Æolus of storm-shaken Les Baux
was powerless. Again, when Blacas, a knight of Provence, died, the
great Sordello chanted one of his most fiery hymns, bidding the princes
of Christendom flock round and eat the heart of the dead lord. 'Let
Rambaude des Baux,' cries the bard, with a sarcasm that is clearly
meant, but at this distance almost unintelligible, 'take also a good piece,
for she is fair and good and truly virtuous; let her keep it well who
knows so well to husband her own weal.' But the poets were not always
adverse to the house of Baux. Fouquet, the beautiful and gentle
melodist whom Dante placed in paradise, served Adelaisie, wife of
Berald, with long service of unhappy love, and wrote upon her death
'The Complaint of Berald des Baux for Adelaisie.' Guillaume de
Cabestan loved Berangère des Baux, and was so loved by her that she
gave him a philtre to drink, whereof he sickened and grew mad. Many
more troubadours are cited as having frequented the castle of Les Baux,
and among the members of the princely house were several poets.
Some of them were renowned for beauty. We hear of a Cécile, called
Passe Rose, because of her exceeding loveliness; also of an unhappy
François, who, after passing eighteen years in prison, yet won the grace
and love of Joan of Naples by his charms. But the real temper of this
fierce tribe was not shown among troubadours, or in the courts of love
and beauty. The stern and barren rock from which they sprang, and the
comet of their scutcheon, are the true symbols of their nature. History
records no end of their ravages and slaughters. It is a tedious catalogue
of blood--how one prince put to fire and sword the whole town of
Courthezon; how another was stabbed in prison by his wife; how a
third besieged the castle of his niece, and sought to undermine her
chamber, knowing her the while to be in childbed; how a fourth was
flayed alive outside the walls of Avignon. There is nothing terrible,
splendid, and savage, belonging to feudal history, of which an example
may not be found in the annals of Les Baux, as narrated by their
chronicler, Jules Canonge.
However abrupt may seem the transition from these memories of the
ancient nobles of Les Baux to mere matters of travel and
picturesqueness, it would be impossible to take leave of the old towns
of Provence without glancing at the cathedrals of S. Trophime at Arles,
and of S. Gilles--a village on the border of the dreary flamingo-haunted
Camargue. Both of these buildings have porches splendidly encrusted
with sculptures, half classical, half mediæval, marking the transition
from ancient to modern art. But that of S. Gilles is by far the richer and
more elaborate. The whole façade of this church is one mass of intricate
decoration; Norman arches and carved lions, like those of Lombard
architecture, mingling fantastically with Greek scrolls of fruit and
flowers, with elegant Corinthian columns jutting out upon the church
steps, and with the old conventional wave-border that is called Etruscan
in our modern jargon. From the midst of florid fret and foliage lean
mild faces of saints and Madonnas. Symbols of evangelists with
half-human, half-animal eyes and wings, are interwoven with the leafy
bowers of cupids. Grave apostles stand erect beneath acanthus wreaths
that ought to crisp the forehead of a laughing Faun or Bacchus. And yet
so full, exuberant, and deftly chosen are these various elements, that
there remains no sense of incongruity or discord. The mediæval spirit
had much trouble to disentangle itself from classic reminiscences; and
fortunately for the picturesqueness of S. Gilles, it did not succeed. How
strangely different is the result of this transition in the south from those
severe and rigid forms which we call Romanesque in Germany and
Normandy and England!
*****
THE CORNICE
It was a dull afternoon in February when we left Nice, and drove across
the mountains to Mentone. Over hill and sea hung a thick mist. Turbia's
Roman tower stood up in cheerless solitude, wreathed round with
driving vapour, and the rocky nest of Esa seemed suspended in a chaos
between sea and sky. Sometimes the fog broke and showed us
Villafranca, lying green and flat in the deep blue below: sometimes a
distant view of higher peaks swam into sight from the shifting cloud.
But the whole scene was desolate. Was it for this that we had left our
English home, and travelled from London day and night? At length we
reached the edge of the cloud, and jingled down by Roccabruna and the
olive-groves, till one by one Mentone's villas came in sight, and at last
we found ourselves at the inn door. That night, and all next day and the
next night, we heard the hoarse sea beat and thunder on the beach. The
rain and wind kept driving from the south, but we consoled ourselves
with thinking that the orange-trees and every kind of flower were
drinking in the moisture and waiting to rejoice in sunlight which would
come.
It was a Sunday morning when we woke and found that the rain had
gone, the sun was shining brightly on the sea, and a clear north wind
was blowing cloud and mist away. Out upon the hills we went, not
caring much what path we took; for everything was beautiful, and hill
and vale were full of garden walks. Through lemon-groves,--pale,
golden-tender trees,--and olives, stretching their grey boughs against
the lonely cottage tiles, we climbed, until we reached the pines and
heath above. Then I knew the meaning of Theocritus for the first time.
We found a well, broad, deep, and clear, with green herbs growing at
the bottom, a runlet flowing from it down the rocky steps, maidenhair,
black adiantum, and blue violets, hanging from the brink and mirrored
in the water. This was just the well in Hylas. Theocritus has been badly
treated. They call him a court poet, dead to Nature, artificial in his
pictures. Yet I recognised this fountain by his verse, just as if he had
showed me the very spot. Violets grow everywhere, of every shade,
from black to lilac. Their stalks are long, and the flowers 'nod' upon
them, so that I see how the Greeks could make them into chaplets--how
Lycidas wore his crown of white violets[5] lying by the fireside
elbow-deep in withered asphodel, watching the chestnuts in the embers,
and softly drinking deep healths to Ageanax far off upon the waves. It
is impossible to go wrong in these valleys. They are cultivated to the
height of about five hundred feet above the sea, in terraces laboriously
built up with walls, earthed and manured, and irrigated by means of
tanks and aqueducts. Above this level, where the virgin soil has not
been yet reclaimed, or where the winds of winter bring down freezing
currents from the mountains through a gap or gully of the lower hills, a
tangled growth of heaths and arbutus, and pines, and rosemarys, and
myrtles, continue the vegetation, till it finally ends in bare grey rocks
and peaks some thousand feet in height. Far above all signs of
cultivation on these arid peaks, you still may see villages and ruined
castles, built centuries ago for a protection from the Moorish pirates.
To these mountain fastnesses the people of the coast retreated when
they descried the sails of their foes on the horizon. In Mentone, not
very long ago, old men might be seen who in their youth were said to
have been taken captive by the Moors; and many Arabic words have
found their way into the patois of the people.
There is something strangely fascinating in the sight of these ruins on
the burning rocks, with their black sentinel cypresses, immensely tall
and far away. Long years and rain and sunlight have made these
castellated eyries one with their native stone. It is hard to trace in their
foundations where Nature's workmanship ends and where man's begins.
What strange sights the mountain villagers must see! The vast blue
plain of the unfurrowed deep, the fairy range of Corsica hung midway
between the sea and sky at dawn or sunset, the stars so close above
their heads, the deep dew-sprinkled valleys, the green pines! On
penetrating into one of these hill-fortresses, you find that it is a whole
village, with a church and castle and piazza, some few feet square,
huddled together on a narrow platform. We met one day three magnates
of Gorbio taking a morning stroll backwards and forwards, up and
down their tiny square. Vehemently gesticulating, loudly chattering,
they talked as though they had not seen each other for ten years, and
were but just unloading their budgets of accumulated news. Yet these
three men probably had lived, eaten, drunk, and talked together from
the cradle to that hour: so true it is that use and custom quicken all our
powers, especially of gossiping and scandal-mongering. S. Agnese is
the highest and most notable of all these villages. The cold and heat
upon its absolutely barren rock must be alike intolerable. In appearance
it is not unlike the Etruscan towns of Central Italy; but there is
something, of course, far more imposing in the immense antiquity and
the historical associations of a Narni, a Fiesole, a Chiusi, or an Orvieto.
Sea-life and rusticity strike a different note from that of those
Apennine-girdled seats of dead civilisation, in which nations, arts, and
religions have gone by and left but few traces,--some wrecks of giant
walls, some excavated tombs, some shrines, where monks still sing and
pray above the relics of the founders of once world-shaking, now
almost forgotten, orders. Here at Mentone there is none of this; the
idyllic is the true note, and Theocritus is still alive.
We do not often scale these altitudes, but keep along the terraced glades
by the side of olive-shaded streams. The violets, instead of peeping
shyly from hedgerows, fall in ripples and cascades over mossy walls
among maidenhair and spleen-worts. They are very sweet, and the
sound of trickling water seems to mingle with their fragrance in a most
delicious harmony. Sound, smell, and hue make up one chord, the
sense of which is pure and perfect peace. The country-people are kind,
letting us pass everywhere, so that we make our way along their
aqueducts and through their gardens, under laden lemon-boughs, the
pale fruit dangling at our ears, and swinging showers of scented dew
upon us as we pass. Far better, however, than lemon or orange trees, are
the olives. Some of these are immensely old, numbering, it is said, five
centuries, so that Petrarch may almost have rested beneath their shade
on his way to Avignon. These veterans are cavernous with age: gnarled,
split, and twisted trunks, throwing out arms that break into a hundred
branches; every branch distinct, and feathered with innumerable sparks
and spikelets of white, wavy, greenish light. These are the leaves, and
the stems are grey with lichens. The sky and sea--two blues, one full of
sunlight and the other purple--set these fountains of perennial
brightness like gems in lapis-lazuli. At a distance the same olives look
hoary and soft--a veil of woven light or luminous haze. When the wind
blows their branches all one way, they ripple like a sea of silver. But
underneath their covert, in the shade, grey periwinkles wind among the
snowy drift of allium. The narcissus sends its arrowy fragrance through
the air, while, far and wide, red anemones burn like fire, with
interchange of blue and lilac buds, white arums, orchises, and pink
gladiolus. Wandering there, and seeing the pale flowers, stars white and
pink and odorous, we dream of Olivet, or the grave Garden of the
Agony, and the trees seem always whispering of sacred things. How
people can blaspheme against the olives, and call them imitations of the
willow, or complain that they are shabby shrubs, I do not know.[6]
This shore would stand for Shelley's Island of Epipsychidion, or the
golden age which Empedocles describes, when the mild nations
worshipped Aphrodite with incense and the images of beasts and
yellow honey, and no blood was spilt upon her altars--when 'the trees
flourished with perennial leaves and fruit, and ample crops adorned
their boughs through all the year.' This even now is literally true of the
lemon-groves, which do not cease to flower and ripen. Everything fits
in to complete the reproduction of Greek pastoral life. The goats eat
cytisus and myrtle on the shore; a whole flock gathered round me as I
sat beneath a tuft of golden green euphorbia the other day, and nibbled
bread from my hands. The frog still croaks by tank and fountain, 'whom
the Muses have ordained to sing for aye,' in spite of Bion's death. The
narcissus, anemone, and hyacinth still tell their tales of love and death.
Hesper still gazes on the shepherd from the mountain-head. The slender
cypresses still vibrate, the pines murmur. Pan sleeps in noontide heat,
and goat-herds and wayfaring men lie down to slumber by the roadside,
under olive-boughs in which cicadas sing. The little villages high up
are just as white, the mountains just as grey and shadowy when evening
falls. Nothing is changed--except ourselves. I expect to find a statue of
Priapus or pastoral Pan, hung with wreaths of flowers--the meal cake,
honey, and spilt wine upon his altar, and young boys and maidens
dancing round. Surely, in some far-off glade, by the side of
lemon-grove or garden, near the village, there must be still a pagan
remnant of glad Nature-worship. Surely I shall chance upon some
Thyrsis piping in the pine-tree shade, or Daphne flying from the arms
of Phoebus. So I dream until I come upon the Calvary set on a solitary
hillock, with its prayer-steps lending a wide prospect across the olives
and the orange-trees, and the broad valleys, to immeasurable skies and
purple seas. There is the iron cross, the wounded heart, the spear, the
reed, the nails, the crown of thorns, the cup of sacrificial blood, the title,
with its superscription royal and divine. The other day we crossed a
brook and entered a lemon-field, rich with blossoms and carpeted with
red anemones. Everything basked in sunlight and glittered with
exceeding brilliancy of hue. A tiny white chapel stood in a corner of the
enclosure. Two iron-grated windows let me see inside: it was a bare
place, containing nothing but a wooden praying-desk, black and
worm-eaten, an altar with its candles and no flowers, and above the
altar a square picture brown with age. On the floor were scattered
several pence, and in a vase above the holy-water vessel stood some
withered hyacinths. As my sight became accustomed to the gloom, I
could see from the darkness of the picture a pale Christ nailed to the
cross with agonising upward eyes and ashy aureole above the bleeding
thorns. Thus I stepped suddenly away from the outward pomp and
bravery of nature to the inward aspirations, agonies, and martyrdoms of
man--from Greek legends of the past to the real Christian present--and I
remembered that an illimitable prospect has been opened to the world,
that in spite of ourselves we must turn our eyes heavenward, inward, to
the infinite unseen beyond us and within our souls. Nothing can take us
back to Phoebus or to Pan. Nothing can again identify us with the
simple natural earth. 'Une immense espérance a traversé la terre,' and
these chapels, with their deep significances, lurk in the fair landscape
like the cares of real life among our dreams of art, or like a fear of
death and the hereafter in the midst of opera music. It is a strange
contrast. The worship of men in those old times was symbolised by
dances in the evening, banquets, libations, and mirth-making.
'Euphrosyne' was alike the goddess of the righteous mind and of the
merry heart. Old withered women telling their rosaries at dusk; belated
shepherds crossing themselves beneath the stars when they pass the
chapel; maidens weighed down with Margaret's anguish of unhappy
love; youths vowing their life to contemplation in secluded
cloisters,--these are the human forms which gather round such chapels;
and the motto of the worshippers consists in this, 'Do often violence to
thy desire.' In the Tyrol we have seen whole villages praying together
at daybreak before their day's work, singing their Miserere and their
Gloria and their Dies Iræ, to the sound of crashing organs and jangling
bells; appealing in the midst of Nature's splendour to the Spirit which is
above Nature, which dwells in darkness rather than light, and loves the
yearnings and contentions of our soul more than its summer gladness
and peace. Even the olives here tell more to us of Olivet and the Garden
than of the oil-press and the wrestling-ground. The lilies carry us to the
Sermon on the Mount, and teach humility, instead of summoning up
some legend of a god's love for a mortal. The hillside tanks and running
streams, and water-brooks swollen by sudden rain, speak of Palestine.
We call the white flowers stars of Bethlehem. The large sceptre-reed;
the fig-tree, lingering in barrenness when other trees are full of fruit;
the locust-beans of the Caruba:--for one suggestion of Greek idylls
there is yet another, of far deeper, dearer power.
But who can resist the influence of Greek ideas at the Cap S. Martin?
Down to the verge of the sea stretch the tall, twisted stems of Levant
pines, and on the caverned limestone breaks the deep blue water.
Dazzling as marble are these rocks, pointed and honeycombed with
constant dashing of the restless sea, tufted with corallines and grey and
purple seaweeds in the little pools, but hard and dry and rough above
tide level. Nor does the sea always lap them quietly; for the last few
days it has come tumbling in, roaring and raging on the beach with
huge waves crystalline in their transparency, and maned with fleecy
spray. Such were the rocks and such the swell of breakers when
Ulysses grasped the shore after his long swim. Samphire, very salt and
fragrant, grows in the rocky honeycomb; then lentisk and beach-loving
myrtle, both exceeding green and bushy; then rosemary and euphorbia
above the reach of spray. Fishermen, with their long reeds, sit lazily
perched upon black rocks above blue waves, sunning themselves as
much as seeking sport. One distant tip of snow, seen far away behind
the hills, reminds us of an alien, unremembered winter. While
dreaming there, this fancy came into my head: Polyphemus was born
yonder in the Gorbio Valley. There he fed his sheep and goats, and on
the hills found scanty pasture for his kine. He and his mother lived in
the white house by the cypress near the stream where tulips grow.
Young Galatea, nursed in the caverns of these rocks, white as the foam,
and shy as the sea fishes, came one morning up the valley to pick
mountain hyacinths, and little Polyphemus led the way. He knew where
violets and sweet narcissus grew, as well as Galatea where pink
coralline and spreading sea-flowers with their waving arms. But
Galatea, having filled her lap with bluebells, quite forgot the leaping
kids, and piping Cyclops, and cool summer caves, and yellow honey,
and black ivy, and sweet vine, and water cold as Alpine snow. Down
the swift streamlet she danced laughingly, and made herself once more
bitter with the sea. But Polyphemus remained,--hungry, sad, gazing on
the barren sea, and piping to the mockery of its waves.
Filled with these Greek fancies, it is strange to come upon a little
sandstone dell furrowed by trickling streams and overgrown with
English primroses; or to enter the village of Roccabruna, with its
mediæval castle and the motto on its walls, Tempora labuntur
tacitisque senescimus annis. A true motto for the town, where the
butcher comes but once a week, and where men and boys, and dogs,
and palms, and lemon-trees grow up and flourish and decay in the same
hollow of the sunny mountain-side. Into the hard conglomerate of the
hill the town is built; house walls and precipices mortised into one
another, dovetailed by the art of years gone by, and riveted by age. The
same plants grow from both alike--spurge, cistus, rue, and henbane,
constant to the desolation of abandoned dwellings. From the castle you
look down on roofs, brown tiles and chimney-pots, set one above the
other like a big card-castle. Each house has its foot on a neighbour's
neck, and its shoulder set against the native stone. The streets meander
in and out, and up and down, overarched and balconied, but very clean.
They swarm with children, healthy, happy, little monkeys, who grow
fat on salt fish and yellow polenta, with oil and sun ad libitum.
At night from Roccabruna you may see the flaring gas-lamps of the
gaming-house at Monaco, that Armida's garden of the nineteenth
century. It is the sunniest and most sheltered spot of all the coast. Long
ago Lucan said of Monaco, 'Non Corus in illum jus habet aut
Zephyrus;' winter never comes to nip its tangled cactuses, and aloes,
and geraniums. The air swoons with the scent of lemon-groves; tall
palm-trees wave their graceful branches by the shore; music of the
softest and the loudest swells from the palace; cool corridors and sunny
seats stand ready for the noontide heat or evening calm; without, are
olive-gardens, green and fresh and full of flowers. But the witch herself
holds her high court and never-ending festival of sin in the painted
banquet-halls and among the green tables.
Let us leave this scene and turn with the country-folk of Roccabruna to
S. Michael's Church at Mentone. High above the sea it stands, and from
its open doors you look across the mountains with their olive-trees.
Inside the church is a seething mass of country-folk and townspeople,
mostly women, and these almost all old, but picturesque beyond
description; kerchiefs of every colour, wrinkles of every shape and
depth, skins of every tone of brown and yellow, voices of every
gruffness, shrillness, strength, and weakness. Wherever an empty
corner can be found, it is soon filled by tottering babies and
mischievous children. The country-women come with their large
dangling earrings of thin gold, wearing pink tulips or lemon-buds in
their black hair. A low buzz of gossiping and mutual recognition keeps
the air alive. The whole service seems a holiday--a general enjoyment
of gala dresses and friendly greetings, very different from the silence,
immobility, and noli me tangere aspect of an English congregation.
Over all drones, rattles, snores, and shrieks the organ; wailing,
querulous, asthmatic, incomplete, its everlasting nasal chant--always
beginning, never ending, through a range of two or three notes ground
into one monotony. The voices of the congregation rise and sink above
it. These southern people, like the Arabs, the Apulians, and the
Spaniards, seem to find their music in a hurdy-gurdy swell of sound.
The other day we met a little girl, walking and spinning, and singing all
the while, whose song was just another version of this chant. It has a
discontented plaintive wail, as if it came from some vast age, and were
a cousin of primeval winds.
At first sight, by the side of Mentone, San Remo is sadly prosaic. The
valleys seem to sprawl, and the universal olives are monotonously grey
upon their thick clay soil. Yet the wealth of flowers in the fat earth is
wonderful. One might fancy oneself in a weedy farm flower-bed
invaded by stray oats and beans and cabbages and garlic from the
kitchen-garden. The country does not suggest a single Greek idea. It
has no form or outline--no barren peaks, no spare and difficult
vegetation. The beauty is rich but tame--valleys green with oats and
corn, blossoming cherry-trees, and sweet bean-fields, figs coming into
leaf, and arrowy bay-trees by the side of sparkling streams: here and
there a broken aqueduct or rainbow bridge hung with maidenhair and
briar and clematis and sarsaparilla.
In the cathedral church of San Siro on Good Friday they hang the
columns and the windows with black; they cover the pictures and
deface the altar; above the high altar they raise a crucifix, and below
they place a catafalque with the effigy of the dead Christ. To this sad
symbol they address their prayers and incense, chant their 'litanies and
lurries,' and clash the rattles, which commemorate their rage against the
traitor Judas. So far have we already passed away from the Greek
feeling of Mentone. As I listened to the hideous din, I could not but
remember the Theocritean burial of Adonis. Two funeral beds prepared:
two feasts recurring in the springtime of the year. What a difference
beneath this superficial similarity--[Greek: kalos nekus oia
katheudôn]--attritus ægrâ macie. But the fast of Good Friday is
followed by the festival of Easter. That, after all, is the chief difference.
After leaving the cathedral we saw a pretty picture in a dull old street of
San Remo--three children leaning from a window, blowing bubbles.
The bubbles floated down the street, of every colour, round and
trembling, like the dreams of life which children dream. The town is
certainly most picturesque. It resembles a huge glacier of houses
poured over a wedge of rock, running down the sides and along the
ridge, and spreading itself into a fan between two torrents on the shore
below. House over house, with balcony and staircase, convent turret
and church tower, palm-trees and olives, roof gardens and clinging
creepers--this white cataract of buildings streams downward from the
lazar-house, and sanctuary, and sandstone quarries on the hill. It is a
mass of streets placed close above each other, and linked together with
arms and arches of solid masonry, as a protection from the earthquakes,
which are frequent at San Remo. The walls are tall, and form a
labyrinth of gloomy passages and treacherous blind alleys, where the
Moors of old might meet with a ferocious welcome. Indeed, San Remo
is a fortress as well as a dwelling-place. Over its gateways may still be
traced the pipes for molten lead, and on its walls the eyeloops for
arrows, with brackets for the feet of archers. Masses of building have
been shaken down by earthquakes. The ruins of what once were houses
gape with blackened chimneys and dark forlorn cellars; mazes of
fungus and unhealthy weeds among the still secure habitations. Hardly
a ray of light penetrates the streets; one learns the meaning of the
Italian word uggia from their cold and gloom. During the day they are
deserted by every one but babies and witchlike old women--some
gossiping, some sitting vacant at the house door, some spinning or
weaving, or minding little children--ugly and ancient as are their own
homes, yet clean as are the streets. The younger population goes afield;
the men on mules laden for the hills, the women burdened like mules
with heavy and disgusting loads. It is an exceptionally good-looking
race; tall, well-grown, and strong.--But to the streets again. The shops
in the upper town are few, chiefly wine-booths and stalls for the sale of
salt fish, eggs, and bread, or cobblers' and tinkers' ware.
Notwithstanding the darkness of their dwellings, the people have a love
of flowers; azaleas lean from their windows, and vines, carefully
protected by a sheath of brickwork, climb the six stories, to blossom
out into a pergola upon the roof. Look at that mass of greenery and
colours, dimly seen from beneath, with a yellow cat sunning herself
upon the parapet! To reach such a garden and such sunlight who would
not mount six stories and thread a labyrinth of passages? I should prefer
a room upon the east side of the town, looking southward to the Molo
and the sea, with a sound of water beneath, and a palm soaring up to
fan my window with his feathery leaves.
The shrines are little spots of brightness in the gloomy streets.
Madonna with a sword; Christ holding His pierced and bleeding heart;
l'Eterno Padre pointing to the dead Son stretched upon His knee; some
souls in torment; S. Roch reminding us of old plagues by the spot upon
his thigh;--these are the symbols of the shrines. Before them stand rows
of pots filled with gillyflowers, placed there by pious, simple, praying
hands--by maidens come to tell their sorrows to our Lady rich in
sorrow, by old women bent and shrivelled, in hopes of paradise or
gratitude for happy days, when Madonna kept Cecchino faithful to his
home, or saved the baby from the fever.
Lower down, between the sea and the hill, is the municipal, aristocratic,
ecclesiastical quarter of San Remo. There stands the Palace Borea--a
truly princely pile, built in the last Renaissance style of splendour, with
sea-nymphs and dolphins, and satyric heads, half lips, half leafage,
round about its doors and windows. Once it formed the dwelling of a
feudal family, but now it is a roomy anthill of a hundred houses, shops,
and offices, the Boreas of to-day retaining but a portion of one flat, and
making profit of the rest. There, too, are the barracks and the syndic's
hall; the Jesuits' school, crowded with boys and girls; the shops for
clothes, confectionery, and trinkets; the piazza, with its fountain and
tasselled planes, and flowery chestnut-trees, a mass of greenery. Under
these trees the idlers lounge, boys play at leap-frog, men at bowls.
Women in San Remo work all day, but men and boys play for the most
part at bowls or toss-penny or leap-frog or morra. San Siro, the
cathedral, stands at one end of the square. Do not go inside; it has a
sickly smell of immemorial incense and garlic, undefinable and
horrible. Far better looks San Siro from the parapet above the torrent.
There you see its irregular half-Gothic outline across a tangle of
lemon-trees and olives. The stream rushes by through high walls,
covered with creepers, spanned by ferny bridges, feathered by one or
two old tufty palms. And over all rises the ancient turret of San Siro,
like a Spanish giralda, a minaret of pinnacles and pyramids and dome
bubbles, with windows showing heavy bells, old clocks, and sundials
painted on the walls, and a cupola of green and yellow tiles like
serpent-scales, to crown the whole. The sea lies beyond, and the
house-roofs break it with grey horizontal lines. Then there are convents,
legions of them, large white edifices, Jesuitical apparently for the most
part, clanging importunate bells, leaning rose-blossoms and
cypress-boughs over their jealous walls.
Lastly, there is the port--the mole running out into the sea, the quay
planted with plane-trees, and the fishing-boats--by which San Remo is
connected with the naval glory of the past--with the Riviera that gave
birth to Columbus--with the Liguria that the Dorias ruled--with the
great name of Genoa. The port is empty enough now; but from the pier
you look back on San Remo and its circling hills, a jewelled town set in
illimitable olive greyness. The quay seems also to be the cattle-market.
There the small buff cows of North Italy repose after their long voyage
or march, kneeling on the sandy ground or rubbing their sides against
the wooden cross awry with age and shorn of all its symbols. Lambs
frisk among the boats; impudent kids nibble the drooping ears of
patient mules. Hinds in white jackets and knee-breeches made of skins,
lead shaggy rams and fiercely bearded goats, ready to butt at every
barking dog, and always seeking opportunities of flight. Farmers and
parish priests in black petticoats feel the cattle and dispute about the
price, or whet their bargains with a draught of wine. Meanwhile the
nets are brought on shore glittering with the fry of sardines, which are
cooked like whitebait, with cuttlefish--amorphous objects stretching
shiny feelers on the hot dry sand--and prickly purple eggs of the
sea-urchin. Women go about their labour through the throng, some
carrying stones upon their heads, or unloading boats and bearing planks
of wood in single file, two marching side by side beneath one load of
lime, others scarcely visible under a stack of oats, another with her
baby in its cradle fast asleep.
San Remo has an elder brother among the hills, which is called San
Romolo, after one of the old bishops of Genoa. Who San Remo was is
buried in remote antiquity; but his town has prospered, while of San
Romolo nothing remains but a ruined hill-convent among pine-trees.
The old convent is worth visiting. Its road carries you into the heart of
the sierra which surrounds San Remo, a hill-country something like the
Jura, undulating and green to the very top with maritime pines and
pinasters. Riding up, you hear all manner of Alpine sounds; brawling
streams, tinkling cowbells, and herdsmen calling to each other on the
slopes. Beneath you lies San Remo, scarcely visible; and over it the
great sea rises ever so far into the sky, until the white sails hang in air,
and cloud and sea-line melt into each other indistinguishably. Spanish
chestnuts surround the monastery with bright blue gentians, hepaticas,
forget-me-nots, and primroses about their roots. The house itself is
perched on a knoll with ample prospect to the sea and to the mountains,
very near to heaven, within a theatre of noble contemplations and
soul-stirring thoughts. If Mentone spoke to me of the poetry of Greek
pastoral life, this convent speaks of mediæval monasticism--of solitude
with God, above, beneath, and all around, of silence and repose from
agitating cares, of continuity in prayer, and changelessness of daily life.
Some precepts of the Imitatio came into my mind: 'Be never wholly
idle; read or write, pray or meditate, or work with diligence for the
common needs.' 'Praiseworthy is it for the religious man to go abroad
but seldom, and to seem to shun, and keep his eyes from men.' 'Sweet is
the cell when it is often sought, but if we gad about, it wearies us by its
seclusion.' Then I thought of the monks so living in this solitude; their
cell windows looking across the valley to the sea, through summer and
winter, under sun and stars. Then would they read or write, what long
melodious hours! or would they pray, what stations on the pine-clad
hills! or would they toil, what terraces to build and plant with corn,
what flowers to tend, what cows to milk and pasture, what wood to cut,
what fir-cones to gather for the winter fire! or should they yearn for
silence, silence from their comrades of the solitude, what whispering
galleries of God, where never human voice breaks loudly, but winds
and streams and lonely birds disturb the awful stillness! In such a
hermitage as this, only more wild, lived S. Francis of Assisi, among the
Apennines.[7] It was there that he learned the tongues of beasts and
birds, and preached them sermons. Stretched for hours motionless on
the bare rocks, coloured like them and rough like them in his brown
peasant's serge, he prayed and meditated, saw the vision of Christ
crucified, and planned his order to regenerate a vicious age. So still he
lay, so long, so like a stone, so gentle were his eyes, so kind and low
his voice, that the mice nibbled breadcrumbs from his wallet, lizards
ran over him, and larks sang to him in the air. There, too, in those long,
solitary vigils, the Spirit of God came upon him, and the spirit of
Nature was even as God's Spirit, and he sang: 'Laudato sia Dio mio
Signore, con tutte le creature, specialmente messer lo frate sole; per
suor luna, e per le stelle; per frate vento e per l'aire, e nuvolo, e sereno e
ogni tempo.' Half the value of this hymn would be lost were we to
forget how it was written, in what solitudes and mountains far from
men, or to ticket it with some abstract word like Pantheism. Pantheism
it is not; but an acknowledgment of that brotherhood, beneath the love
of God, by which the sun and moon and stars, and wind and air and
cloud, and clearness and all weather, and all creatures, are bound
together with the soul of man.
Few, of course, were like S. Francis. Probably no monk of San Romolo
was inspired with his enthusiasm for humanity, or had his revelation of
the Divine Spirit inherent in the world. Still fewer can have felt the
æsthetic charm of Nature but most vaguely. It was as much as they
could boast, if they kept steadily to the rule of their order, and attended
to the concerns each of his own soul. A terrible selfishness, if rightly
considered; but one which accorded with the delusion that this world is
a cave of care, the other world a place of torture or undying bliss, death
the prime object of our meditation, and lifelong abandonment of our
fellow-men the highest mode of existence. Why, then, should monks,
so persuaded of the riddle of the earth, have placed themselves in
scenes so beautiful? Why rose the Camaldolis and Chartreuses over
Europe? white convents on the brows of lofty hills, among the rustling
boughs of Vallombrosas, in the grassy meadows of
Engelbergs,--always the eyries of Nature's lovers, men smitten with the
loveliness of earth? There is surely some meaning in these poetic
stations.
Here is a sentence of the Imitatio which throws some light upon the
hymn of S. Francis and the sites of Benedictine monasteries, by
explaining the value of natural beauty for monks who spent their life in
studying death: 'If thy heart were right, then would every creature be to
thee a mirror of life, and a book of holy doctrine. There is no creature
so small and vile that does not show forth the goodness of God.' With
this sentence bound about their foreheads, walked Fra Angelico and S.
Francis. To men like them the mountain valleys and the skies, and all
that they contained, were full of deep significance. Though they
reasoned 'de conditione humanæ miseriæ,' and 'de contemptu mundi,'
yet the whole world was a pageant of God's glory, a testimony to His
goodness. Their chastened senses, pure hearts, and simple wills were as
wings by which they soared above the things of earth, and sent the
music of their souls aloft with every other creature in the symphony of
praise. To them, as to Blake, the sun was no mere blazing disc or ball,
but 'an innumerable company of the heavenly host singing, "Holy, holy,
holy is the Lord God Almighty."' To them the winds were brothers, and
the streams were sisters--brethren in common dependence upon God
their Father, brethren in common consecration to His service, brethren
by blood, brethren by vows of holiness. Unquestioning faith rendered
this world no puzzle; they overlooked the things of sense because the
spiritual things were ever present, and as clear as day. Yet did they not
forget that spiritual things are symbolised by things of sense; and so the
smallest herb of grass was vital to their tranquil contemplations. We
who have lost sight of the invisible world, who set our affections more
on things of earth, fancy that because these monks despised the world,
and did not write about its landscapes, therefore they were dead to its
beauty. This is mere vanity: the mountains, stars, seas, fields, and living
things were only swallowed up in the one thought of God, and made
subordinate to the awfulness of human destinies. We to whom hills are
hills, and seas are seas, and stars are ponderable quantities, speak, write,
and reason of them as of objects interesting in themselves. The monks
were less ostensibly concerned about such things, because they only
found in them the vestibules and symbols of a hidden mystery.
The contrast between the Greek and mediæval modes of regarding
Nature is not a little remarkable. Both Greeks and monks, judged by
nineteenth-century standards, were unobservant of natural beauties.
They make but brief and general remarks upon landscapes and the like.
The [Greek: pontiôn te kumatôn anêrithmon gelasma] is very rare. But
the Greeks stopped at the threshold of Nature; the forces they found
there, the gods, were inherent in Nature, and distinct. They did not, like
the monks, place one spiritual power, omnipotent and omnipresent,
above all, and see in Nature lessons of Divine government. We
ourselves having somewhat overstrained the latter point of view, are
now apt to return vaguely to Greek fancies. Perhaps, too, we talk so
much about scenery because it is scenery to us, and the life has gone
out of it.
I cannot leave the Cornice without one word about a place which lies
between Mentone and San Remo. Bordighera has a beauty which is
quite distinct from both. Palms are its chief characteristics. They lean
against the garden walls, and feather the wells outside the town, where
women come with brazen pitchers to draw water. In some of the
marshy tangles of the plain, they spring from a thick undergrowth of
spiky leaves, and rear their tall aërial arms against the deep blue
background of the sea or darker purple of the distant hills. White
pigeons fly about among their branches, and the air is loud with
cooings and with rustlings, and the hoarser croaking of innumerable
frogs. Then, in the olive-groves that stretch along the level shore, are
labyrinths of rare and curious plants, painted tulips and white
periwinkles, flinging their light of blossoms and dark glossy leaves
down the swift channels of the brawling streams. On each side of the
rivulets they grow, like sister cataracts of flowers instead of spray. At
night fresh stars come out along the coast, beneath the stars of heaven;
for you can see the lamps of Ventimiglia and Mentone and Monaco,
and, far away, the lighthouses upon the promontories of Antibes and
the Estrelles. At dawn, a vision of Corsica grows from the sea. The
island lies eighty miles away, but one can trace the dark strip of
irregular peaks glowing amid the gold and purple of the rising sun. If
the air is clear and bright, the snows and overvaulting clouds which
crown its mountains shine all day, and glitter like an apparition in the
bright blue sky. 'Phantom fair,' half raised above the sea, it stands, as
unreal and transparent as the moon when seen in April sunlight, yet not
to be confounded with the shape of any cloud. If Mentone speaks of
Greek legends, and San Romolo restores the monastic past, we feel
ourselves at Bordighera transported to the East; and lying under its tall
palms can fancy ourselves at Tyre or Daphne, or in the gardens of a
Moslem prince.
Note.--Dec. 1873. My old impressions are renewed and confirmed by a
third visit, after seven years, to this coast. For purely idyllic loveliness,
the Cornice is surpassed by nothing in the South. A very few spots in
Sicily, the road between Castellammare and Amalfi, and the island of
Corfu, are its only rivals in this style of scenery. From Cannes to Sestri
is one continuous line of exquisitely modulated landscape beauty,
which can only be fully appreciated by travellers in carriage or on foot.
*****
AJACCIO
It generally happens that visitors to Ajaccio pass over from the Cornice
coast, leaving Nice at night, and waking about sunrise to find
themselves beneath the frowning mountains of Corsica. The difference
between the scenery of the island and the shores which they have left is
very striking. Instead of the rocky mountains of the Cornice, intolerably
dry and barren at their summits, but covered at their base with villages
and ancient towns and olive-fields, Corsica presents a scene of solitary
and peculiar grandeur. The highest mountain-tops are covered with
snow, and beneath the snow-level to the sea they are as green as Irish or
as English hills, but nearly uninhabited and uncultivated. Valleys of
almost Alpine verdure are succeeded by tracts of chestnut wood and
scattered pines, or deep and flowery brushwood--the 'maquis' of
Corsica, which yields shelter to its traditional outlaws and bandits. Yet
upon these hillsides there are hardly any signs of life; the whole
country seems abandoned to primeval wildness and the majesty of
desolation. Nothing can possibly be more unlike the smiling Riviera,
every square mile of which is cultivated like a garden, and every valley
and bay dotted over with white villages. After steaming for a few hours
along this savage coast, the rocks which guard the entrance to the bay
of Ajaccio, murderous-looking teeth and needles ominously christened
Sanguinari, are passed, and we enter the splendid land-locked harbour,
on the northern shore of which Ajaccio is built. About three centuries
ago the town, which used to occupy the extreme or eastern end of the
bay, was removed to a more healthy point upon the northern coast, so
that Ajaccio is quite a modern city. Visitors who expect to find in it the
picturesqueness of Genoa or San Remo, or even of Mentone, will be
sadly disappointed. It is simply a healthy, well-appointed town of
recent date, the chief merits of which are, that it has wide streets, and is
free, externally at least, from the filth and rubbish of most southern
seaports.
But if Ajaccio itself is not picturesque, the scenery which it commands,
and in the heart of which it lies, is of the most magnificent. The bay of
Ajaccio resembles a vast Italian lake--a Lago Maggiore, with greater
space between the mountains and the shore. From the snow-peaks of
the interior, huge granite crystals clothed in white, to the southern
extremity of the bay, peak succeeds peak and ridge rises behind ridge in
a line of wonderful variety and beauty. The atmospheric changes of
light and shadow, cloud and colour, on this upland country, are as
subtle and as various as those which lend their beauty to the scenery of
the lakes, while the sea below is blue and rarely troubled. One could
never get tired with looking at this view. Morning and evening add new
charms to its sublimity and beauty. In the early morning Monte d'Oro
sparkles like a Monte Rosa with its fresh snow, and the whole inferior
range puts on the crystal blueness of dawn among the Alps. In the
evening, violet and purple tints and the golden glow of Italian sunset
lend a different lustre to the fairyland. In fact, the beauties of
Switzerland and Italy are curiously blended in this landscape.
In soil and vegetation the country round Ajaccio differs much from the
Cornice. There are very few olive-trees, nor is the cultivated ground
backed up so immediately by stony mountains; but between the
seashore and the hills there is plenty of space for pasture-land, and
orchards of apricot and peach-trees, and orange gardens. This
undulating champaign, green with meadows and watered with clear
streams, is very refreshing to the eyes of Northern people, who may
have wearied of the bareness and greyness of Nice or Mentone. It is
traversed by excellent roads, recently constructed on a plan of the
French Government, which intersect the country in all directions, and
offer an infinite variety of rides or drives to visitors. The broken granite
of which these roads are made is very pleasant for riding over. Most of
the hills through which they strike, after starting from Ajaccio, are
clothed with a thick brushwood of box, ilex, lentisk, arbutus, and
laurustinus, which stretches down irregularly into vineyards,
olive-gardens, and meadows. It is, indeed, the native growth of the
island; for wherever a piece of ground is left untilled, the macchi grow
up, and the scent of their multitudinous aromatic blossoms is so strong
that it may be smelt miles out at sea. Napoleon, at S. Helena, referred to
this fragrance when he said that he should know Corsica blindfold by
the smell of its soil. Occasional woods of holm oak make darker
patches on the landscape, and a few pines fringe the side of enclosure
walls or towers. The prickly pear runs riot in and out among the hedges
and upon the walls, diversifying the colours of the landscape with its
strange grey-green masses and unwieldy fans. In spring, when peach
and almond trees are in blossom, and when the roadside is starred with
asphodels, this country is most beautiful in its gladness. The macchi
blaze with cistus flowers of red and silver. Golden broom mixes with
the dark purple of the great French lavender, and over the whole mass
of blossom wave plumes of Mediterranean heath and sweet-scented
yellow coronilla. Under the stems of the ilex peep cyclamens, pink and
sweet; the hedgerows are a tangle of vetches, convolvuluses, lupines,
orchises, and alliums, with here and there a purple iris. It would be
difficult to describe all the rare and lovely plants which are found here
in a profusion that surpasses even the flower-gardens of the Cornice,
and reminds one of the most favoured Alpine valleys in their early
spring.
Since the French occupied Corsica they have done much for the island
by improving its harbours and making good roads, and endeavouring to
mitigate the ferocity of the people. But they have many things to
contend against, and Corsica is still behind the other provinces of
France. The people are idle, haughty, umbrageous, fiery, quarrelsome,
fond of gipsy life, and retentive through generations of old feuds and
prejudices to an almost inconceivable extent. Then the nature of the
country itself offers serious obstacles to its proper colonisation and
cultivation. The savage state of the island and its internal feuds have
disposed the Corsicans to quit the seaboard for their mountain villages
and fortresses, so that the great plains at the foot of the hills are
unwholesome for want of tillage and drainage. Again, the mountains
themselves have in many parts been stripped of their forests, and
converted into mere wildernesses of macchi stretching up and down
their slopes for miles and miles of useless desolation. Another
impediment to proper cultivation is found in the old habit of what is
called free pasturage. The highland shepherds are allowed by the
national custom to drive down their flocks and herds to the lowlands
during the winter, so that fences are broken, young crops are browsed
over and trampled down, and agriculture becomes a mere impossibility.
The last and chief difficulty against which the French have had to
contend, and up to this time with apparent success, is brigandage. The
Corsican system of brigandage is so very different from that of the
Italians, Sicilians, and Greeks, that a word may be said about its
peculiar character. In the first place, it has nothing at all to do with
robbery and thieving. The Corsican bandit took to a free life among the
macchi, not for the sake of supporting himself by lawless depredation,
but because he had put himself under a legal and social ban by
murdering some one in obedience to the strict code of honour of his
country. His victim may have been the hereditary foe of his house for
generations, or else the newly made enemy of yesterday. But in either
case, if he had killed him fairly, after a due notification of his intention
to do so, he was held to have fulfilled a duty rather than to have
committed a crime. He then betook himself to the dense tangles of
evergreens which I have described, where he lived upon the charity of
countryfolk and shepherds. In the eyes of those simple people it was a
sacred duty to relieve the necessities of the outlaws, and to guard them
from the bloodhounds of justice. There was scarcely a respectable
family in Corsica who had not one or more of its members thus alla
campagna, as it was euphemistically styled. The Corsicans themselves
have attributed this miserable state of things to two principal causes.
The first of these was the ancient bad government of the island: under
its Genoese rulers no justice was administered, and private vengeance
for homicide or insult became a necessary consequence among the
haughty and warlike families of the mountain villages. Secondly, the
Corsicans have been from time immemorial accustomed to wear arms
in everyday life. They used to sit at their house doors and pace the
streets with musket, pistol, dagger, and cartouch-box on their persons;
and on the most trivial occasion of merriment or enthusiasm they
would discharge their firearms. This habit gave a bloody termination to
many quarrels, which might have ended more peaceably had the parties
been unarmed; and so the seeds of vendetta were constantly being sown.
Statistics published by the French Government present a hideous
picture of the state of bloodshed in Corsica even during this century. In
one period of thirty years (between 1821 and 1850) there were 4319
murders in the island. Almost every man was watching for his
neighbour's life, or seeking how to save his own; and agriculture and
commerce were neglected for this grisly game of hide-and-seek. In
1853 the French began to take strong measures, and, under the Prefect
Thuillier, they hunted the bandits from the macchi, killing between 200
and 300 of them. At the same time an edict was promulgated against
bearing arms. It is forbidden to sell the old Corsican stiletto in the
shops, and no one may carry a gun, even for sporting purposes, unless
he obtains a special licence. These licences, moreover, are only granted
for short and precisely measured periods.
In order to appreciate the stern and gloomy character of the Corsicans,
it is necessary to leave the smiling gardens of Ajaccio, and to visit
some of the more distant mountain villages--Vico, Cavro, Bastelica, or
Bocognano, any of which may easily be reached from the capital.
Immediately after quitting the seaboard, we enter a country austere in
its simplicity, solemn without relief, yet dignified by its majesty and by
the sense of freedom it inspires. As we approach the mountains, the
macchi become taller, feathering man-high above the road, and
stretching far away upon the hills. Gigantic masses of granite, shaped
like buttresses and bastions, seem to guard the approaches to these hills;
while, looking backward over the green plain, the sea lies smiling in a
haze of blue among the rocky horns and misty headlands of the coast.
There is a stateliness about the abrupt inclination of these granite slopes,
rising from their frowning portals by sharp arêtes to the snows piled on
their summits, which contrasts in a strange way with the softness and
beauty of the mingling sea and plain beneath. In no landscape are more
various qualities combined; in none are they so harmonised as to
produce so strong a sense of majestic freedom and severe power.
Suppose that we are on the road to Corte, and have now reached
Bocognano, the first considerable village since we left Ajaccio.
Bocognano might be chosen as typical of Corsican hill-villages, with
its narrow street, and tall tower-like houses of five or six stories high,
faced with rough granite, and pierced with the smallest windows and
very narrow doorways. These buildings have a mournful and desolate
appearance. There is none of the grandeur of antiquity about them; no
sculptured arms or castellated turrets, or balconies or spacious
staircases, such as are common in the poorest towns of Italy. The signs
of warlike occupation which they offer, and their sinister aspect of
vigilance, are thoroughly prosaic. They seem to suggest a state of
society in which feud and violence were systematised into routine.
There is no relief to the savage austerity of their forbidding aspect; no
signs of wealth or household comfort; no trace of art, no liveliness and
gracefulness of architecture. Perched upon their coigns of vantage,
these villages seem always menacing, as if Saracen pirates, or Genoese
marauders, or bandits bent on vengeance, were still for ever on the
watch. Forests of immensely old chestnut-trees surround Bocognano on
every side, so that you step from the village streets into the shade of
woods that seem to have remained untouched for centuries. The
country-people support themselves almost entirely upon the fruit of
these chestnuts; and there is a large department of Corsica called
Castagniccia, from the prevalence of these trees and the sustenance
which the inhabitants derive from them. Close by the village brawls a
torrent, such as one may see in the Monte Rosa valleys or the
Apennines, but very rarely in Switzerland. It is of a pure green colour,
absolutely like Indian jade, foaming round the granite boulders, and
gliding over smooth slabs of polished stone, and eddying into still, deep
pools fringed with fern. Monte d'Oro, one of the largest mountains of
Corsica, soars above, and from his snows the purest water, undefiled by
glacier mud or the débris of avalanches, melts away. Following the
stream, we rise through the macchi and the chestnut woods, which
grow more sparely by degrees, until we reach the zone of beeches. Here
the scene seems suddenly transferred to the Pyrenees; for the road is
carried along abrupt slopes, thickly set with gigantic beech-trees,
overgrown with pink and silver lichens. In the early spring their last
year's leaves are still crisp with hoar-frost; one morning's journey has
brought us from the summer of Ajaccio to winter on these heights,
where no flowers are visible but the pale hellebore and tiny lilac
crocuses. Snow-drifts stretch by the roadside, and one by one the
pioneers of the vast pine-woods of the interior appear. A great portion
of the pine-forest (Pinus larix, or Corsican pine, not larch) between
Bocognano and Corte had recently been burned by accident when we
passed by. Nothing could be more forlorn than the black leafless stems
and branches emerging from the snow. Some of these trees were
mast-high, and some mere saplings. Corte itself is built among the
mountain fastnesses of the interior. The snows and granite cliffs of
Monte Rotondo overhang it to the north-west, while two fair valleys
lead downward from its eyrie to the eastern coast. The rock on which it
stands rises to a sharp point, sloping southward, and commanding the
valleys of the Golo and the Tavignano. Remembering that Corte was
the old capital of Corsica, and the centre of General Paoli's government,
we are led to compare the town with Innsprück, Meran, or Grenoble. In
point of scenery and situation it is hardly second to any of these
mountain-girdled cities; but its poverty and bareness are scarcely less
striking than those of Bocognano.
The whole Corsican character, with its stern love of justice, its furious
revengefulness and wild passion for freedom, seems to be illustrated by
the peculiar elements of grandeur and desolation in this landscape.
When we traverse the forest of Vico or the rocky pasture-lands of Niolo,
the history of the Corsican national heroes, Giudice della Rocca and
Sampiero, becomes intelligible, nor do we fail to understand some of
the mysterious attraction which led the more daring spirits of the island
to prefer a free life among the macchi and pine-woods to placid lawful
occupations in farms and villages. The lives of the two men whom I
have mentioned are so prominent in Corsican history, and are so often
still upon the lips of the common people, that it may be well to sketch
their outlines in the foreground of the Salvator Rosa landscape just
described. Giudice was the governor of Corsica, as lieutenant for the
Pisans, at the end of the thirteenth century. At that time the island
belonged to the republic of Pisa, but the Genoese were encroaching on
them by land and sea, and the whole life of their brave champion was
spent in a desperate struggle with the invaders, until at last he died, old,
blind, and in prison, at the command of his savage foes. Giudice was
the title which the Pisans usually conferred upon their governor, and
Della Rocca deserved it by right of his own inexorable love of justice.
Indeed, justice seems to have been with him a passion, swallowing up
all other feelings of his nature. All the stories which are told of him
turn upon this point in his character; and though they may not be
strictly true, they illustrate the stern virtues for which he was celebrated
among the Corsicans, and show what kind of men this harsh and
gloomy nation loved to celebrate as heroes. This is not the place either
to criticise these legends or to recount them at full length. The most
famous and the most characteristic may, however, be briefly told. On
one occasion, after a victory over the Genoese, he sent a message that
the captives in his hands should be released if their wives and sisters
came to sue for them. The Genoese ladies embarked, and arrived in
Corsica, and to Giudice's nephew was intrusted the duty of fulfilling his
uncle's promise. In the course of executing his commission, the youth
was so smitten with the beauty of one of the women that he
dishonoured her. Thereupon Giudice had him at once put to death.
Another story shows the Spartan justice of this hero in a less savage
light. He was passing by a cowherd's cottage, when he heard some
young calves bleating. On inquiring what distressed them, he was told
that the calves had not enough milk to drink after the farm people had
been served. Then Giudice made it a law that the calves throughout the
land should take their fill before the cows were milked.
Sampiero belongs to a later period of Corsican history. After a long
course of misgovernment the Genoese rule had become unbearable.
There was no pretence of administering justice, and private vengeance
had full sway in the island. The sufferings of the nation were so great
that the time had come for a new judge or saviour to rise among them.
Sampiero was the son of obscure parents who lived at Bastelica. But
his abilities very soon declared themselves, and made a way for him in
the world. He spent his youth in the armies of the Medici and of the
French Francis, gaining great renown as a brave soldier. Bayard
became his friend, and Francis made him captain of his Corsican bands.
But Sampiero did not forget the wrongs of his native land while thus on
foreign service. He resolved, if possible, to undermine the power of
Genoa, and spent the whole of his manhood and old age in one long
struggle with their great captain, Stephen Doria. Of his stern patriotism
and Roman severity of virtue the following story is a terrible
illustration. Sampiero, though a man of mean birth, had married an
heiress of the noble Corsican house of the Ornani. His wife, Vannina,
was a woman of timid and flexible nature, who, though devoted to her
husband, fell into the snares of his enemies. During his absence on an
embassy to Algiers the Genoese induced her to leave her home at
Marseilles and to seek refuge in their city, persuading her that this step
would secure the safety of her child. She was starting on her journey
when a friend of Sampiero arrested her, and brought her back to Aix, in
Provence. Sampiero, when he heard of these events, hurried to France,
and was received by a relative of his, who hinted that he had known of
Vannina's projected flight. 'E tu hai taciuto?' was Sampiero's only
answer, accompanied by a stroke of his poignard that killed the
lukewarm cousin. Sampiero now brought his wife from Aix to
Marseilles, preserving the most absolute silence on the way, and there,
on entering his house, he killed her with his own hand. It is said that he
loved Vannina passionately; and when she was dead, he caused her to
be buried with magnificence in the church of S. Francis. Like Giudice,
Sampiero fell at last a prey to treachery. The murder of Vannina had
made the Ornani his deadly foes. In order to avenge her blood, they
played into the hands of the Genoese, and laid a plot by which the
noblest of the Corsicans was brought to death. First, they gained over to
their scheme a monk of Bastelica, called Ambrogio, and Sampiero's
own squire and shield-bearer, Vittolo. By means of these men, in whom
he trusted, he was drawn defenceless and unattended into a deeply
wooded ravine near Cavro, not very far from his birthplace, where the
Ornani and their Genoese troops surrounded him. Sampiero fired his
pistols in vain, for Vittolo had loaded them with the shot downwards.
Then he drew his sword, and began to lay about him, when the same
Vittolo, the Judas, stabbed him from behind, and the old lion fell dead
by his friend's hand. Sampiero was sixty-nine when he died, in the year
1567. It is satisfactory to know that the Corsicans have called traitors
and foes to their country Vittoli for ever. These two examples of
Corsican patriots are enough; we need not add to theirs the history of
Paoli--a milder and more humane, but scarcely less heroic leader. Paoli,
however, in the hour of Corsica's extremest peril, retired to England,
and died in philosophic exile. Neither Giudice nor Sampiero would
have acted thus. The more forlorn the hope, the more they struggled.
Among the old Corsican customs which are fast dying out, but which
still linger in the remote valleys of Niolo and Vico, is the vócero, or
funeral chant, improvised by women at funerals over the bodies of the
dead. Nothing illustrates the ferocious temper and savage passions of
the race better than these vóceri, many of which have been written
down and preserved. Most of them are songs of vengeance and
imprecation, mingled with hyperbolical laments and utterances of
extravagant grief, poured forth by wives and sisters at the side of
murdered husbands and brothers. The women who sing them seem to
have lost all milk of human kindness, and to have exchanged the
virtues of their sex for Spartan fortitude and the rage of furies. While
we read their turbid lines we are carried in imagination to one of the
cheerless houses of Bastelica or Bocognano, overshadowed by its
mournful chestnut-tree, on which the blood of the murdered man is yet
red. The gridata, or wake, is assembled in a dark room. On the wooden
board, called tola, the corpse lies stretched; and round it are women,
veiled in the blue-black mantle of Corsican costume, moaning and
rocking themselves upon their chairs. The pasto or conforto, food
supplied for mourners, stands upon a side table, and round the room are
men with savage eyes and bristling beards, armed to the teeth, keen for
vengeance. The dead man's musket and pocket-pistol lie beside him,
and his bloody shirt is hung up at his head. Suddenly, the silence,
hitherto only disturbed by suppressed groans and muttered curses, is
broken by a sharp cry. A woman rises: it is the sister of the dead man;
she seizes his shirt, and holding it aloft with Mænad gestures and
frantic screams, gives rhythmic utterance to her grief and rage. 'I was
spinning, when I heard a great noise: it was a gunshot, which went into
my heart, and seemed a voice that cried, "Run, thy brother is dying." I
ran into the room above; I took the blow into my breast; I said, "Now
he is dead, there is nothing to give me comfort. Who will undertake thy
vengeance? When I show thy shirt, who will vow to let his beard grow
till the murderer is slain? Who is there left to do it? A mother near her
death? A sister? Of all our race there is only left a woman, without kin,
poor, orphan, and a girl. Yet, O my brother! never fear. For thy
vengeance thy sister is enough!
'"Ma per fà la to bindetta, Sta siguru, basta anch ella!
Give me the pistol; I will shoulder the gun; I will away to the hills. My
brother, heart of thy sister, thou shalt be avenged!"' A vócero declaimed
upon the bier of Giammatteo and Pasquale, two cousins, by the sister of
the former, is still fiercer and more energetic in its malediction. This
Erinnys of revenge prays Christ and all the saints to extirpate the
murderer's whole race, to shrivel it up till it passes from the earth. Then,
with a sudden and vehement transition to the pathos of her own sorrow,
she exclaims:-'Halla mai bista nissunu Tumbà l'omi pe li canti?'
It appears from these words that Giammatteo's enemies had killed him
because they were jealous of his skill in singing. Shortly after, she
curses the curate of the village, a kinsman of the murderer, for refusing
to toll the funeral bells; and at last, all other threads of rage and sorrow
being twined and knotted into one, she gives loose to her raging thirst
for blood: 'If only I had a son, to train like a sleuth-hound, that he might
track the murderer! Oh, if I had a son! Oh, if I had a lad!' Her words
seem to choke her, and she swoons, and remains for a short time
insensible. When the Bacchante of revenge awakes, it is with milder
feelings in her heart: 'O brother mine, Matteo! art thou sleeping? Here I
will rest with thee and weep till daybreak.' It is rare to find in literature
so crude and intense an expression of fiery hatred as these
untranslatable vóceri present. The emotion is so simple and so strong
that it becomes sublime by mere force, and affects us with a strange
pathos when contrasted with the tender affection conveyed in such
terms of endearment as 'my dove,' 'my flower,' 'my pheasant,' 'my
bright painted orange,' addressed to the dead. In the vóceri it often
happens that there are several interlocutors: one friend questions and
another answers; or a kinswoman of the murderer attempts to justify
the deed, and is overwhelmed with deadly imprecations. Passionate
appeals are made to the corpse: 'Arise! Do you not hear the women cry?
Stand up. Show your wounds, and let the fountains of your blood flow!
Alas! he is dead; he sleeps; he cannot hear!' Then they turn again to
tears and curses, feeling that no help or comfort can come from the
clay-cold form. The intensity of grief finds strange language for its
utterance. A girl, mourning over her father, cries:-'Mi l'hannu crucifissatu Cume Ghiesu Cristu in croce.'
Once only, in Viale's collection, does any friend of the dead remember
mercy. It is an old woman, who points to the crucifix above the bier.
But all the vóceri are not so murderous. Several are composed for girls
who died unwedded and before their time, by their mothers or
companions. The language of these laments is far more tender and
ornate. They praise the gentle virtues and beauty of the girl, her piety
and helpful household ways. The most affecting of these dirges is that
which celebrates the death of Romana, daughter of Dariola Danesi.
Here is a pretty picture of the girl: 'Among the best and fairest maidens
you were like a rose among flowers, like the moon among stars; so far
more lovely were you than the loveliest. The youths in your presence
were like lighted torches, but full of reverence; you were courteous to
all, but with none familiar. In church they gazed at you, but you looked
at none of them; and after mass you said, "Mother, let us go." Oh! who
will console me for your loss? Why did the Lord so much desire you?
But now you rest in heaven, all joy and smiles; for the world was not
worthy of so fair a face. Oh, how far more beautiful will Paradise be
now!' Then follows a piteous picture of the old bereaved mother, to
whom a year will seem a thousand years, who will wander among
relatives without affection, neighbours without love; and who, when
sickness comes, will have no one to give her a drop of water, or to wipe
the sweat from her brow, or to hold her hand in death. Yet all that is left
for her is to wait and pray for the end, that she may join again her
darling.
But it is time to return to Ajaccio itself. At present the attractions and
ornaments of the town consist of a good public library, Cardinal Fesch's
large but indifferent collection of pictures, two monuments erected to
Napoleon, and Napoleon's house. It will always be the chief pride of
Ajaccio that she gave birth to the great emperor. Close to the harbour,
in a public square by the sea-beach, stands an equestrian statue of the
conqueror, surrounded by his four brothers on foot. They are all attired
in Roman fashion, and are turned seaward, to the west, as if to
symbolise the emigration of this family to subdue Europe. There is
something ludicrous and forlorn in the stiffness of the
group--something even pathetic, when we think how Napoleon gazed
seaward from another island, no longer on horseback, no longer
laurel-crowned, an unthroned, unseated conqueror, on S. Helena. His
father's house stands close by. An old Italian waiting-woman, who had
been long in the service of the Murats, keeps it and shows it. She has
the manners of a lady, and can tell many stories of the various members
of the Buonaparte family. Those who fancy that Napoleon was born in
a mean dwelling of poor parents will be surprised to find so much
space and elegance in these apartments. Of course his family was not
rich by comparison with the riches of French or English nobles. But for
Corsicans they were well-to-do, and their house has an air of antique
dignity. The chairs of the entrance-saloon have been literally stripped
of their coverings by enthusiastic visitors; the horse-hair stuffing
underneath protrudes itself with a sort of comic pride, as if protesting
that it came to be so tattered in an honourable service. Some of the
furniture seems new; but many old presses, inlaid with marbles, agates,
and lapis-lazuli, such as Italian families preserve for generations, have
an air of respectable antiquity about them. Nor is there any doubt that
the young Napoleon led his minuets beneath the stiff girandoles of the
formal dancing-room. There, too, in a dark back chamber, is the bed in
which he was born. At its foot is a photograph of the Prince Imperial
sent by the Empress Eugénie, who, when she visited the room, wept
much pianse molto (to use the old lady's phrase)--at seeing the place
where such lofty destinies began. On the wall of the same room is a
portrait of Napoleon himself as the young general of the republic--with
the citizen's unkempt hair, the fierce fire of the Revolution in his eyes,
a frown upon his forehead, lips compressed, and quivering nostrils; also
one of his mother, the pastille of a handsome woman, with Napoleonic
eyes and brows and nose, but with a vacant simpering mouth. Perhaps
the provincial artist knew not how to seize the expression of this feature,
the most difficult to draw. For we cannot fancy that Letizia had lips
without the firmness or the fulness of a majestic nature.
The whole first story of this house belonged to the Buonaparte family.
The windows look out partly on a little court and partly on narrow
streets. It was, no doubt, the memory of this home that made Napoleon,
when emperor, design schemes for the good of Corsica--schemes that
might have brought him more honour than many conquests, but which
he had no time or leisure to carry out. On S. Helena his mind often
reverted to them, and he would speak of the gummy odours of the
macchi wafted from the hillsides to the seashore.
*****
MONTE GENEROSO
The long hot days of Italian summer were settling down on plain and
country when, in the last week of May, we travelled northward from
Florence and Bologna seeking coolness. That was very hard to find in
Lombardy. The days were long and sultry, the nights short, without a
respite from the heat. Milan seemed a furnace, though in the Duomo
and the narrow shady streets there was a twilight darkness which at
least looked cool. Long may it be before the northern spirit of
improvement has taught the Italians to despise the wisdom of their
forefathers, who built those sombre streets of palaces with overhanging
eaves, that, almost meeting, form a shelter from the fiercest sun. The
lake country was even worse than the towns; the sunlight lay all day
asleep upon the shining waters, and no breeze came to stir their surface
or to lift the tepid veil of haze, through which the stony mountains,
with their yet unmelted patches of winter snow, glared as if in mockery
of coolness.
Then we heard of a new inn, which had just been built by an
enterprising Italian doctor below the very top of Monte Generoso.
There was a picture of it in the hotel at Cadenabbia, but this gave but
little idea of any particular beauty. A big square house, with many
windows, and the usual ladies on mules, and guides with alpenstocks,
advancing towards it, and some round bushes growing near, was all it
showed. Yet there hung the real Monte Generoso above our heads, and
we thought it must be cooler on its height than by the lake-shore. To
find coolness was the great point with us just then. Moreover, some one
talked of the wonderful plants that grew among its rocks, and of its
grassy slopes enamelled with such flowers as make our cottage gardens
at home gay in summer, not to speak of others rarer and peculiar to the
region of the Southern Alps. Indeed, the Generoso has a name for
flowers, and it deserves it, as we presently found.
This mountain is fitted by its position for commanding one of the finest
views in the whole range of the Lombard Alps. A glance at the map
shows that. Standing out pre-eminent among the chain of lower hills to
which it belongs, the lakes of Lugano and Como with their long arms
enclose it on three sides, while on the fourth the plain of Lombardy
with its many cities, its rich pasture-lands and cornfields intersected by
winding river-courses and straight interminable roads, advances to its
very foot. No place could be better chosen for surveying that contrasted
scene of plain and mountain, which forms the great attraction of the
outlying buttresses of the central Alpine mass. The superiority of the
Monte Generoso to any of the similar eminences on the northern
outskirts of Switzerland is great. In richness of colour, in
picturesqueness of suggestion, in sublimity and breadth of prospect, its
advantages are incontestable. The reasons for this superiority are
obvious. On the Italian side the transition from mountain to plain is far
more abrupt; the atmosphere being clearer, a larger sweep of distance is
within our vision; again, the sunlight blazes all day long upon the very
front and forehead of the distant Alpine chain, instead of merely
slanting along it, as it does upon the northern side.
From Mendrisio, the village at the foot of the mountain, an easy
mule-path leads to the hotel, winding first through English-looking
hollow lanes with real hedges, which are rare in this country, and
English primroses beneath them. Then comes a forest region of
luxuriant chestnut-trees, giants with pink boles just bursting into late
leafage, yellow and tender, but too thin as yet for shade. A little higher
up, the chestnuts are displaced by wild laburnums bending under their
weight of flowers. The graceful branches meet above our heads,
sweeping their long tassels against our faces as we ride beneath them,
while the air for a good mile is full of fragrance. It is strange to be
reminded in this blooming labyrinth of the dusty suburb roads and villa
gardens of London. The laburnum is pleasant enough in S. John's
Wood or the Regent's Park in May--a tame domesticated thing of
brightness amid smoke and dust. But it is another joy to see it
flourishing in its own home, clothing acres of the mountain-side in a
very splendour of spring-colour, mingling its paler blossoms with the
golden broom of our own hills, and with the silver of the hawthorn and
wild cherry. Deep beds of lilies-of-the-valley grow everywhere beneath
the trees; and in the meadows purple columbines, white asphodels, the
Alpine spiræa, tall, with feathery leaves, blue scabious, golden
hawkweeds, turkscap lilies, and, better than all, the exquisite narcissus
poeticus, with its crimson-tipped cup, and the pure pale lilies of San
Bruno, are crowded in a maze of dazzling brightness. Higher up the
laburnums disappear, and flaunting crimson peonies gleam here and
there upon the rocks, until at length the gentians and white
ranunculuses of the higher Alps displace the less hardy flowers of Italy.
About an hour below the summit of the mountain we came upon the
inn, a large clean building, with scanty furniture and snowy wooden
floors, guiltless of carpets. It is big enough to hold about a hundred
guests; and Doctor Pasta, who built it, a native of Mendrisio, was gifted
either with much faith or with a real prophetic instinct.[8] Anyhow he
deserves commendation for his spirit of enterprise. As yet the house is
little known to English travellers: it is mostly frequented by Italians
from Milan, Novara, and other cities of the plain, who call it the Italian
Righi, and come to it, as cockneys go to Richmond, for noisy picnic
excursions, or at most for a few weeks' villeggiatura in the summer
heats. When we were there in May the season had scarcely begun, and
the only inmates besides ourselves were a large party from Milan,
ladies and gentlemen in holiday guise, who came, stayed one night,
climbed the peak at sunrise, and departed amid jokes and shouting and
half-childish play, very unlike the doings of a similar party in sober
England. After that the stillness of nature descended on the mountain,
and the sun shone day after day upon that great view which seemed
created only for ourselves. And what a view it was! The plain
stretching up to the high horizon, where a misty range of pink
cirrus-clouds alone marked the line where earth ended and the sky
began, was islanded with cities and villages innumerable, basking in
the hazy shimmering heat. Milan, seen through the doctor's telescope,
displayed its Duomo perfect as a microscopic shell, with all its
exquisite fretwork, and Napoleon's arch of triumph surmounted by the
four tiny horses, as in a fairy's dream. Far off, long silver lines marked
the lazy course of Po and Ticino, while little lakes like Varese and the
lower end of Maggiore spread themselves out, connecting the
mountains with the plain. Five minutes' walk from the hotel brought us
to a ridge where the precipice fell suddenly and almost sheer over one
arm of Lugano Lake. Sullenly outstretched asleep it lay beneath us,
coloured with the tints of fluor-spar, or with the changeful green and
azure of a peacock's breast. The depth appeared immeasurable. San
Salvadore had receded into insignificance: the houses and churches and
villas of Lugano bordered the lake-shore with an uneven line of
whiteness. And over all there rested a blue mist of twilight and of haze,
contrasting with the clearness of the peaks above. It was sunset when
we first came here; and, wave beyond wave, the purple Italian hills
tossed their crested summits to the foot of a range of stormy clouds that
shrouded the high Alps. Behind the clouds was sunset, clear and golden;
but the mountains had put on their mantle for the night, and the hem of
their garment was all we were to see. And yet--over the edge of the
topmost ridge of cloud, what was that long hard line of black, too solid
and immovable for cloud, rising into four sharp needles clear and well
defined? Surely it must be the familiar outline of Monte Rosa itself, the
form which every one who loves the Alps knows well by heart, which
picture-lovers know from Ruskin's woodcut in the 'Modern Painters.'
For a moment only the vision stayed: then clouds swept over it again,
and from the place where the empress of the Alps had been, a pillar of
mist shaped like an angel's wing, purple and tipped with gold, shot up
against the pale green sky. That cloud-world was a pageant in itself, as
grand and more gorgeous perhaps than the mountains would have been.
Deep down through the hollows of the Simplon a thunderstorm was
driving; and we saw forked flashes once and again, as in a distant world,
lighting up the valleys for a moment, and leaving the darkness blacker
behind them as the storm blurred out the landscape forty miles away.
Darkness was coming to us too, though our sky was clear and the stars
were shining brightly. At our feet the earth was folding itself to sleep;
the plain was wholly lost; little islands of white mist had formed
themselves, and settled down upon the lakes and on their marshy
estuaries; the birds were hushed; the gentian-cups were filling to the
brim with dew. Night had descended on the mountain and the plain; the
show was over.
The dawn was whitening in the east next morning, when we again
scrambled through the dwarf beechwood to the precipice above the lake.
Like an ink-blot it lay, unruffled, slumbering sadly. Broad sheets of
vapour brooded on the plain, telling of miasma and fever, of which we
on the mountain, in the pure cool air, knew nothing. The Alps were all
there now--cold, unreal, stretching like a phantom line of snowy peaks,
from the sharp pyramids of Monte Viso and the Grivola in the west to
the distant Bernina and the Ortler in the east. Supreme among them
towered Monte Rosa--queenly, triumphant, gazing down in proud
pre-eminence, as she does when seen from any point of the Italian plain.
There is no mountain like her. Mont Blanc himself is scarcely so regal;
and she seems to know it, for even the clouds sweep humbled round her
base, girdling her at most, but leaving her crown clear and free. Now,
however, there were no clouds to be seen in all the sky. The mountains
had a strange unshriven look, as if waiting to be blessed. Above them,
in the cold grey air, hung a low black arch of shadow, the shadow of
the bulk of the huge earth, which still concealed the sun. Slowly,
slowly this dark line sank lower, till, one by one, at last, the peaks
caught first a pale pink flush; then a sudden golden glory flashed from
one to the other, as they leapt joyfully into life. It is a supreme moment
this first burst of life and light over the sleeping world, as one can only
see it on rare days and in rare places like the Monte Generoso. The
earth--enough of it at least for us to picture to ourselves the whole--lies
at our feet; and we feel as the Saviour might have felt, when from the
top of that high mountain He beheld the kingdoms of the world and all
the glory of them. Strangely and solemnly may we image to our fancy
the lives that are being lived down in those cities of the plain: how
many are waking at this very moment to toil and a painful weariness, to
sorrow, or to 'that unrest which men miscall delight;' while we upon our
mountain buttress, suspended in mid-heaven and for a while removed
from daily cares, are drinking in the beauty of the world that God has
made so fair and wonderful. From this same eyrie, only a few years ago,
the hostile armies of France, Italy, and Austria might have been
watched moving in dim masses across the plains, for the possession of
which they were to clash in mortal fight at Solferino and Magenta. All
is peaceful now. It is hard to picture the waving cornfields trodden
down, the burning villages and ransacked vineyards, all the horrors of
real war to which that fertile plain has been so often the prey. But now
these memories of
Old, unhappy, far-off things, And battles long ago,
do but add a calm and beauty to the radiant scene that lies before us.
And the thoughts which it suggests, the images with which it stores our
mind, are not without their noblest uses. The glory of the world sinks
deeper into our shallow souls than we well know; and the spirit of its
splendour is always ready to revisit us on dark and dreary days at home
with an unspeakable refreshment. Even as I write, I seem to see the
golden glow sweeping in broad waves over the purple hills nearer and
nearer, till the lake brightens at our feet, and the windows of Lugano
flash with sunlight, and little boats creep forth across the water like
spiders on a pond, leaving an arrowy track of light upon the green
behind them, while Monte Salvadore with its tiny chapel and a patch of
the further landscape are still kept in darkness by the shadow of the
Generoso itself. The birds wake into song as the sun's light comes;
cuckoo answers cuckoo from ridge to ridge; dogs bark; and even the
sounds of human life rise up to us: children's voices and the murmurs
of the market-place ascending faintly from the many villages hidden
among the chestnut-trees beneath our feet; while the creaking of a cart
we can but just see slowly crawling along the straight road by the lake,
is heard at intervals.
The full beauty of the sunrise is but brief. Already the low lakelike
mists we saw last night have risen and spread, and shaken themselves
out into masses of summer clouds, which, floating upward, threaten to
envelop us upon our vantage-ground. Meanwhile they form a changeful
sea below, blotting out the plain, surging up into the valleys with the
movement of a billowy tide, attacking the lower heights like the
advance-guard of a besieging army, but daring not as yet to invade the
cold and solemn solitudes of the snowy Alps. These, too, in time, when
the sun's heat has grown strongest, will be folded in their midday pall
of sheltering vapour.
The very summit of Monte Generoso must not be left without a word of
notice. The path to it is as easy as the sheep-walks on an English down,
though cut along grass-slopes descending at a perilously sharp angle.
At the top the view is much the same, as far as the grand features go, as
that which is commanded from the cliff by the hotel. But the rocks here
are crowded with rare Alpine flowers--delicate golden auriculas with
powdery leaves and stems, pale yellow cowslips, imperial purple
saxifrages, soldanellas at the edge of lingering patches of the winter
snow, blue gentians, crocuses, and the frail, rosy-tipped ranunculus,
called glacialis. Their blooming time is brief. When summer comes the
mountain will be bare and burned, like all Italian hills. The Generoso is
a very dry mountain, silent and solemn from its want of streams. There
is no sound of falling waters on its crags; no musical rivulets flow
down its sides, led carefully along the slopes, as in Switzerland, by the
peasants, to keep their hay-crops green and gladden the thirsty turf
throughout the heat and drought of summer. The soil is a Jurassic
limestone: the rain penetrates the porous rock, and sinks through cracks
and fissures, to reappear above the base of the mountain in a full-grown
stream. This is a defect in the Generoso, as much to be regretted as the
want of shade upon its higher pastures. Here, as elsewhere in Piedmont,
the forests are cut for charcoal; the beech-scrub, which covers large
tracts of the hills, never having the chance of growing into trees much
higher than a man. It is this which makes an Italian mountain at a
distance look woolly, like a sheep's back. Among the brushwood,
however, lilies-of-the-valley and Solomon's seals delight to grow; and
the league-long beds of wild strawberries prove that when the
laburnums have faded, the mountain will become a garden of feasting.
It was on the crest of Monte Generoso, late one afternoon in May, that
we saw a sight of great beauty. The sun had yet about an hour before it
sank behind the peaks of Monte Rosa, and the sky was clear, except for
a few white clouds that floated across the plain of Lombardy. Then as
we sat upon the crags, tufted with soldanellas and auriculas, we could
see a fleecy vapour gliding upward from the hollows of the mountain,
very thin and pale, yet dense enough to blot the landscape to the south
and east from sight. It rose with an imperceptible motion, as the
Oceanides might have soared from the sea to comfort Prometheus in
the tragedy of Æschylus. Already the sun had touched its upper edge
with gold, and we were expecting to be enveloped in a mist; when
suddenly upon the outspread sheet before us there appeared two forms,
larger than life, yet not gigantic, surrounded with haloes of such
tempered iridescence as the moon half hidden by a summer cloud is
wont to make. They were the glorified figures of ourselves; and what
we did, the phantoms mocked, rising or bowing, or spreading wide
their arms. Some scarce-felt breeze prevented the vapour from passing
across the ridge to westward, though it still rose from beneath, and kept
fading away into thin air above our heads. Therefore the vision lasted
as long as the sun stayed yet above the Alps; and the images with their
aureoles shrank and dilated with the undulations of the mist. I could not
but think of that old formula for an anthropomorphic Deity--'the
Brocken-spectre of the human spirit projected on the mists of the
Non-ego.' Even like those cloud-phantoms are the gods made in the
image of man, who have been worshipped through successive ages of
the world, gods dowered with like passions to those of the races who
have crouched before them, gods cruel and malignant and lustful,
jealous and noble and just, radiant or gloomy, the counterparts of men
upon a vast and shadowy scale. But here another question rose. If the
gods that men have made and ignorantly worshipped be really but
glorified copies of their own souls, where is the sun in this parallel?
Without the sun's rays the mists of Monte Generoso could have shown,
no shadowy forms. Without some other power than the mind of man,
could men have fashioned for themselves those ideals that they named
their gods? Unseen by Greek, or Norseman, or Hindoo, the potent force
by which alone they could externalise their image, existed outside them,
independent of their thought. Nor does the trite epigram touch the
surface of the real mystery. The sun, the human beings on the mountain,
and the mists are all parts of one material universe: the transient
phenomenon we witnessed was but the effect of a chance combination.
Is, then, the anthropomorphic God as momentary and as accidental in
the system of the world as that vapoury spectre? The God in whom we
live and move and have our being must be far more all-pervasive, more
incognisable by the souls of men, who doubt not for one moment of His
presence and His power. Except for purposes of rhetoric the metaphor
that seemed so clever fails. Nor, when once such thoughts have been
stirred in us by such a sight, can we do better than repeat Goethe's
sublime profession of a philosophic mysticism. This translation I made
one morning on the Pasterze Gletscher beneath the spires of the Gross
Glockner:--
To Him who from eternity, self-stirred, Himself hath made by His
creative word! To Him, supreme, who causeth Faith to be, Trust, Hope,
Love, Power, and endless Energy! To Him, who, seek to name Him as
we will, Unknown within Himself abideth still!
Strain ear and eye, till sight and sense be dim; Thou'lt find but faint
similitudes of Him: Yea, and thy spirit in her flight of flame Still strives
to gauge the symbol and the name: Charmed and compelled thou
climb'st from height to height, And round thy path the world shines
wondrous bright; Time, Space, and Size, and Distance cease to be, And
every step is fresh infinity. What were the God who sat outside to scan
The spheres that 'neath His finger circling ran? God dwells within, and
moves the world and moulds, Himself and Nature in one form enfolds:
Thus all that lives in Him and breathes and is, Shall ne'er His puissance,
ne'er His spirit miss.
The soul of man, too, is an universe: Whence follows it that race with
race concurs In naming all it knows of good and true God,--yea, its own
God; and with homage due Surrenders to His sway both earth and
heaven; Fears Him, and loves, where place for love is given.
*****
LOMBARD VIGNETTES
ON THE SUPERGA
This is the chord of Lombard colouring in May. Lowest in the scale:
bright green of varied tints, the meadow-grasses mingling with willows
and acacias, harmonised by air and distance. Next, opaque blue--the
blue of something between amethyst and lapis-lazuli--that belongs
alone to the basements of Italian mountains. Higher, the roseate
whiteness of ridged snow on Alps or Apennines. Highest, the blue of
the sky, ascending from pale turquoise to transparent sapphire filled
with light. A mediæval mystic might have likened this chord to the
spiritual world. For the lowest region is that of natural life, of plant and
bird and beast, and unregenerate man; it is the place of faun and nymph
and satyr, the plain where wars are fought and cities built, and work is
done. Thence we climb to purified humanity, the mountains of
purgation, the solitude and simplicity of contemplative life not yet
made perfect by freedom from the flesh. Higher comes that thin white
belt, where are the resting places of angelic feet, the points whence
purged souls take their flight toward infinity. Above all is heaven, the
hierarchies ascending row on row to reach the light of God.
This fancy occurred to me as I climbed the slope of the Superga, gazing
over acacia hedges and poplars to the mountains bare in morning light.
The occasional occurrence of bars across this chord--poplars shivering
in sun and breeze, stationary cypresses as black as night, and tall
campanili with the hot red shafts of glowing brick--adds just enough of
composition to the landscape. Without too much straining of the
allegory, the mystic might have recognised in these aspiring bars the
upward effort of souls rooted in the common life of earth.
The panorama, unrolling as we ascend, is enough to overpower a lover
of beauty. There is nothing equal to it for space and breadth and
majesty. Monte Rosa, the masses of Mont Blanc blent with the Grand
Paradis, the airy pyramid of Monte Viso, these are the battlements of
that vast Alpine rampart, in which the vale of Susa opens like a gate.
To west and south sweep the Maritime Alps and the Apennines.
Beneath, glides the infant Po; and where he leads our eyes, the plain is
only limited by pearly mist.
A BRONZE BUST OF CALIGULA AT TURIN
The Albertina bronze is one of the most precious portraits of antiquity,
not merely because it confirms the testimony of the green basalt bust in
the Capitol, but also because it supplies an even more emphatic and
impressive illustration to the narrative of Suetonius.
Caligula is here represented as young and singularly beautiful. It is
indeed an ideal Roman head, with the powerful square modelling, the
crisp short hair, low forehead and regular firm features, proper to the
noblest Roman type. The head is thrown backward from the throat; and
there is a something of menace or defiance or suffering in the
suggestion of brusque movement given to the sinews of the neck. This
attitude, together with the tension of the forehead, and the fixed
expression of pain and strain communicated by the lines of the
mouth--strong muscles of the upper lip and abruptly chiselled under
lip--in relation to the small eyes, deep set beneath their cavernous and
level brows, renders the whole face a monument of spiritual anguish. I
remember that the green basalt bust of the Capitol has the same anxious
forehead, the same troubled and overburdened eyes; but the agony of
this fretful mouth, comparable to nothing but the mouth of Pandolfo
Sigismondo Malatesta, and, like that, on the verge of breaking into the
spasms of delirium, is quite peculiar to the Albertina bronze. It is just
this which the portrait of the Capitol lacks for the completion of
Caligula. The man who could be so represented in art had nothing
wholly vulgar in him. The brutality of Caracalla, the overblown
sensuality of Nero, the effeminacy of Commodus or Heliogabalus, are
all absent here. This face idealises the torture of a morbid soul. It is
withal so truly beautiful that it might easily be made the poem of high
suffering or noble passion. If the bronze were plastic, I see how a great
sculptor, by but few strokes, could convert it into an agonising Stephen
or Sebastian. As it is, the unimaginable touch of disease, the unrest of
madness, made Caligula the genius of insatiable appetite; and his
martyrdom was the torment of lust and ennui and everlasting agitation.
The accident of empire tantalised him with vain hopes of satisfying the
Charybdis of his soul's sick cravings. From point to point he passed of
empty pleasure and unsatisfying cruelty, for ever hungry; until the
malady of his spirit, unrestrained by any limitations, and with the right
medium for its development, became unique--the tragic type of
pathological desire. What more than all things must have plagued a
man with that face was probably the unavoidable meanness of his
career. When we study the chapters of Suetonius, we are forced to feel
that, though the situation and the madness of Caligula were
dramatically impressive, his crimes were trivial and, small. In spite of
the vast scale on which he worked his devilish will, his life presents a
total picture of sordid vice, differing only from pot-house dissipation
and schoolboy cruelty in point of size. And this of a truth is the
Nemesis of evil. After a time, mere tyrannous caprice must become
commonplace and cloying, tedious to the tyrant, and uninteresting to
the student of humanity: nor can I believe that Caligula failed to
perceive this to his own infinite disgust.
Suetonius asserts that he was hideously ugly. How are we to square this
testimony with the witness of the bronze before us? What changed the
face, so beautiful and terrible in youth, to ugliness that shrank from
sight in manhood? Did the murderers find it blurred in its fine
lineaments, furrowed with lines of care, hollowed with the soul's
hunger? Unless a life of vice and madness had succeeded in making
Caligula's face what the faces of some maniacs are--the bloated ruin of
what was once a living witness to the soul within--I could fancy that
death may have sanctified it with even more beauty than this bust of the
self-tormented young man shows. Have we not all seen the anguish of
thought-fretted faces smoothed out by the hands of the Deliverer?
FERRARI AT VERCELLI
It is possible that many visitors to the Cathedral of Como have carried
away the memory of stately women with abundant yellow hair and
draperies of green and crimson, in a picture they connect thereafter
with Gaudenzio Ferrari. And when they come to Milan, they are
probably both impressed and disappointed by a Martyrdom of S.
Catherine in the Brera, bearing the same artist's name. If they wish to
understand this painter, they must seek him at Varallo, at Saronno, and
at Vercelli. In the Church of S. Cristoforo in Vercelli, Gaudenzio
Ferrari at the full height of his powers showed what he could do to
justify Lomazzo's title chosen for him of the Eagle. He has indeed the
strong wing and the swiftness of the king of birds. And yet the works of
few really great painters--and among the really great we place
Ferrari--leave upon the mind a more distressing sense of imperfection.
Extraordinary fertility of fancy, vehement dramatic passion, sincere
study of nature, and great command of technical resources are here (as
elsewhere in Ferrari's frescoes) neutralised by an incurable defect of the
combining and harmonising faculty, so essential to a masterpiece.
There is stuff enough of thought and vigour and imagination to make a
dozen artists. And yet we turn away disappointed from the crowded,
dazzling, stupefying wilderness of forms and faces on these mighty
walls.
All that Ferrari derived from actual life--the heads of single figures, the
powerful movement of men and women in excited action, the
monumental pose of two praying nuns--is admirably rendered. His
angels too, in S. Cristoforo as elsewhere, are quite original; not only in
their type of beauty, which is terrestrial and peculiar to Ferrari, without
a touch of Correggio's sensuality; but also in the intensity of their
emotion, the realisation of their vitality. Those which hover round the
Cross in the fresco of the 'Crucifixion' are as passionate as any angels
of the Giottesque masters in Assisi. Those again which crowd the
Stable of Bethlehem in the 'Nativity' yield no point of idyllic charm to
Gozzoli's in the Riccardi Chapel.
The 'Crucifixion' and the 'Assumption of Madonna' are very tall and
narrow compositions, audacious in their attempt to fill almost
unmanageable space with a connected action. Of the two frescoes the
'Crucifixion,' which has points of strong similarity to the same subject
at Varallo, is by far the best. Ferrari never painted anything at once
truer to life and nobler in tragic style than the fainting Virgin. Her face
expresses the very acme of martyrdom--not exaggerated nor spasmodic,
but real and sublime--in the suffering of a stately matron. In points like
this Ferrari cannot be surpassed. Raphael could scarcely have done
better; besides, there is an air of sincerity, a stamp of popular truth, in
this episode, which lies beyond Raphael's sphere. It reminds us rather
of Tintoretto.
After the 'Crucifixion,' I place the 'Adoration of the Magi,' full of fine
mundane motives and gorgeous costumes; then the 'Sposalizio' (whose
marriage, I am not certain), the only grandly composed picture of the
series, and marked by noble heads; then the 'Adoration of the
Shepherds,' with two lovely angels holding the bambino. The
'Assumption of the Magdalen'--for which fresco there is a valuable
cartoon in the Albertina Collection at Turin--must have been a fine
picture; but it is ruined now. An oil altar-piece in the choir of the same
church struck me less than the frescoes. It represents Madonna and a
crowd of saints under an orchard of apple-trees, with cherubs curiously
flung about almost at random in the air. The motive of the orchard is
prettily conceived and carried out with spirit.
What Ferrari possessed was rapidity of movement, fulness and richness
of reality, exuberance of invention, excellent portraiture, dramatic
vehemence, and an almost unrivalled sympathy with the swift and
passionate world of angels. What he lacked was power of composition,
simplicity of total effect, harmony in colouring, control over his own
luxuriance, the sense of tranquillity. He seems to have sought grandeur
in size and multitude, richness, éclat, contrast. Being the disciple of
Lionardo and Raphael, his defects are truly singular. As a composer,
the old leaven of Giovenone remained in him; but he felt the dramatic
tendencies of a later age, and in occasional episodes he realised them
with a force and furia granted to very few of the Italian painters.
LANINI AT VERCELLI
The Casa Mariano is a palace which belonged to a family of that name.
Like many houses of the sort in Italy, it fell to vile uses; and its hall of
audience was turned into a lumber-room. The Operai of Vercelli, I was
told, bought the palace a few years ago, restored the noble hall, and
devoted a smaller room to a collection of pictures valuable for students
of the early Vercellese style of painting. Of these there is no need to
speak. The great hall is the gem of the Casa Mariano. It has a coved
roof, with a large flat oblong space in the centre of the ceiling. The
whole of this vault and the lunettes beneath were painted by Lanini; so
runs the tradition of the fresco-painter's name; and though much injured
by centuries of outrage, and somewhat marred by recent restoration,
these frescoes form a precious monument of Lombard art. The object of
the painter's design seems to have been the glorification of Music. In
the central compartment of the roof is an assembly of the gods,
obviously borrowed from Raphael's 'Marriage of Cupid and Psyche' in
the Farnesina at Rome. The fusion of Roman composition with
Lombard execution constitutes the chief charm of this singular work,
and makes it, so far as I am aware, unique. Single figures of the
goddesses, and the whole movement of the scene upon Olympus, are
transcribed without attempt at concealment. And yet the fresco is not a
barefaced copy. The manner of feeling and of execution is quite
different from that of Raphael's school. The poetry and sentiment are
genuinely Lombard. None of Raphael's pupils could have carried out
his design with a delicacy of emotion and a technical skill in colouring
so consummate. What, we think, as we gaze upward, would the Master
have given for such a craftsman? The hardness, coarseness, and animal
crudity of the Roman School are absent: so also is their vigour. But
where the grace of form and colour is so soft and sweet, where the
high-bred calm of good company is so sympathetically rendered, where
the atmosphere of amorous languor and of melody is so artistically
diffused, we cannot miss the powerful modelling and rather vulgar
tours de force of Giulio Romano. The scale of tone is silvery golden.
There are no hard blues, no coarse red flesh-tints, no black shadows.
Mellow lights, the morning hues of primrose, or of palest amber,
pervade the whole society. It is a court of gentle and harmonious souls;
and though this style of beauty might cloy, at first sight there is
something ravishing in those yellow-haired white-limbed, blooming
deities. No movement of lascivious grace as in Correggio, no
perturbation of the senses as in some of the Venetians, disturbs the
rhythm of their music; nor is the pleasure of the flesh, though felt by
the painter and communicated to the spectator, an interruption to their
divine calm. The white, saffron-haired goddesses are grouped together
like stars seen in the topaz light of evening, like daffodils half
smothered in snowdrops, and among them, Diana, with the crescent on
her forehead, is the fairest. Her dream-like beauty need fear no
comparison with the Diana of the Camera di S. Paolo. Apollo and
Bacchus are scarcely less lovely in their bloom of earliest manhood;
honey-pale, as Greeks would say; like statues of living electron;
realising Simaetha's picture of her lover and his friend:
[Greek:
tois d' ên xanthotera men elichrysoio geneias, stêthea de stilbonta poly
pleon ê tu Selana.[9]]
It was thus that the almost childlike spirit of the Milanese painters felt
the antique: how differently from their Roman brethren! It was thus
that they interpreted the lines of their own poets:-E i tuoi capei più volte ho somigliati Di Cerere a le paglie secche o
bionde Dintorno crespi al tuo capo legati.[10]
Yet the painter of this hall--whether we are to call him Lanini or
another--was not a composer. Where he has not robbed the motives and
the distribution of the figures from Raphael, he has nothing left but
grace of detail. The intellectual feebleness of his style may be seen in
many figures of women playing upon instruments of music, ranged
around the walls. One girl at the organ is graceful; another with a
tambourine has a sort of Bassarid beauty. But the group of Apollo,
Pegasus, and a Muse upon Parnassus, is a failure in its meaningless
frigidity, while few of these subordinate compositions show power of
conception or vigour of design.
Lanini, like Sodoma, was a native of Vercelli; and though he was
Ferrari's pupil, there is more in him of Luini or of Sodoma than of his
master. He does not rise at any point to the height of these three great
masters, but he shares some of Luini's and Sodoma's fine qualities,
without having any of Ferrari's force. A visit to the mangled remnants
of his frescoes in S. Caterina will repay the student of art. This was
once, apparently, a double church, or a church with the hall and chapel
of a confraternita appended to it. One portion of the building was
painted with the history of the Saint; and very lovely must this work
have been, to judge by the fragments which have recently been rescued
from whitewash, damp, and ruthless mutilation. What wonderful
Lombard faces, half obliterated on the broken wall and mouldering
plaster, smile upon us like drowned memories swimming up from the
depths of oblivion! Wherever three or four are grouped together, we
find an exquisite little picture--an old woman and two young women in
a doorway, for example, telling no story, but touching us with simple
harmony of form. Nothing further is needed to render their grace
intelligible. Indeed, knowing the faults of the school, we may seek
some consolation by telling ourselves that these incomplete fragments
yield Lanini's best. In the coved compartments of the roof, above the
windows, ran a row of dancing boys; and these are still most
beautifully modelled, though the pallor of recent whitewash is upon
them. All the boys have blonde hair. They are naked, with scrolls or
ribbons wreathed around them, adding to the airiness of their continual
dance. Some of the loveliest are in a room used to stow away the
lumber of the church--old boards and curtains, broken lanterns,
candle-ends in tin sconces, the musty apparatus of festival adornments,
and in the midst of all a battered, weather-beaten bier.
THE PIAZZA OF PIACENZA
The great feature of Piacenza is its famous piazza--romantically,
picturesquely perfect square, surpassing the most daring attempts of the
scene-painter, and realising a poet's dreams. The space is considerable,
and many streets converge upon it at irregular angles. Its finest
architectural feature is the antique Palace of the Commune: Gothic
arcades of stone below, surmounted by a brick building with
wonderfully delicate and varied terra-cotta work in the round-arched
windows. Before this façade, on the marble pavement, prance the
bronze equestrian statues of two Farnesi--insignificant men,
exaggerated horses, flying drapery--as barocco as it is possible to be in
style, but so splendidly toned with verdigris, so superb in their bravura
attitude, and so happily placed in the line of two streets lending far
vistas from the square into the town beyond, that it is difficult to
criticise them seriously. They form, indeed, an important element in the
pictorial effect, and enhance the terra-cotta work of the façade by the
contrast of their colour.
The time to see this square is in evening twilight--that wonderful hour
after sunset--when the people are strolling on the pavement, polished to
a mirror by the pacing of successive centuries, and when the cavalry
soldiers group themselves at the angles under the lamp-posts or beneath
the dimly lighted Gothic arches of the Palace. This is the magical
mellow hour to be sought by lovers of the picturesque in all the towns
of Italy, the hour which, by its tender blendings of sallow western lights
with glimmering lamps, casts the veil of half shadow over any
crudeness and restores the injuries of Time; the hour when all the tints
of these old buildings are intensified, etherealised, and harmonised by
one pervasive glow. When I last saw Piacenza, it had been raining all
day; and ere sundown a clearing had come from the Alps, followed by
fresh threatenings of thunderstorms. The air was very liquid. There was
a tract of yellow sunset sky to westward, a faint new moon half
swathed in mist above, and over all the north a huge towered
thundercloud kept flashing distant lightnings. The pallid primrose of
the West, forced down and reflected back from that vast bank of
tempest, gave unearthly beauty to the hues of church and palace--tender
half-tones of violet and russet paling into greys and yellows on what in
daylight seemed but dull red brick. Even the uncompromising façade of
S. Francesco helped; and the Dukes were like statues of the 'Gran
Commendatore,' waiting for Don Giovanni's invitation.
MASOLINO AT CASTIGLIONE D'OLONA
Through the loveliest Arcadian scenery of woods and fields and
rushing waters the road leads downward from Varese to Castiglione.
The Collegiate Church stands on a leafy hill above the town, with fair
prospect over groves and waterfalls and distant mountains. Here in the
choir is a series of frescoes by Masolino da Panicale, the master of
Masaccio, who painted them about the year 1428. 'Masolinus de
Florentia pinxit' decides their authorship. The histories of the Virgin, S.
Stephen and S. Lawrence, are represented: but the injuries of time and
neglect have been so great that it is difficult to judge them fairly. All
we feel for certain is that Masolino had not yet escaped from the
traditional Giottesque mannerism. Only a group of Jews stoning
Stephen, and Lawrence before the tribunal, remind us by dramatic
energy of the Brancacci Chapel.
The Baptistery frescoes, dealing with the legend of S. John, show a
remarkable advance; and they are luckily in better preservation. A
soldier lifting his two-handed sword to strike off the Baptist's head is a
vigorous figure, full of Florentine realism. Also in the Baptism in
Jordan we are reminded of Masaccio by an excellent group of
bathers--one man taking off his hose, another putting them on again, a
third standing naked with his back turned, and a fourth shivering
half-dressed with a look of curious sadness on his face. The nude has
been carefully studied and well realised. The finest composition of this
series is a large panel representing a double action--Salome at Herod's
table begging for the Baptist's head, and then presenting it to her
mother Herodias. The costumes are quattrocento Florentine, exactly
rendered. Salome is a graceful slender creature; the two women who
regard her offering to Herodias with mingled curiosity and horror, are
well conceived. The background consists of a mountain landscape in
Masaccio's simple manner, a rich Renaissance villa, and an open loggia.
The architecture perspective is scientifically accurate, and a frieze of
boys with garlands on the villa is in the best manner of Florentine
sculpture. On the mountain side, diminished in scale, is a group of
elders, burying the body of S. John. These are massed together and
robed in the style of Masaccio, and have his virile dignity of form and
action. Indeed this interesting wall-painting furnishes an epitome of
Florentine art, in its intentions and achievements, during the first half
of the fifteenth century. The colour is strong and brilliant, and the
execution solid.
The margin of the Salome panel has been used for scratching the
Chronicle of Castiglione. I read one date, 1568, several of the next
century, the record of a duel between two gentlemen, and many
inscriptions to this effect, 'Erodiana Regina,' 'Omnia praetereunt,' &c. A
dirty one-eyed fellow keeps the place. In my presence he swept the
frescoes over with a scratchy broom, flaying their upper surface in
profound unconsciousness of mischief. The armour of the executioner
has had its steel colours almost rubbed off by this infernal process.
Damp and cobwebs are far kinder.
THE CERTOSA
The Certosa of Pavia leaves upon the mind an impression of
bewildering sumptuousness: nowhere else are costly materials so
combined with a lavish expenditure of the rarest art. Those who have
only once been driven round together with the crew of sightseers, can
carry little away but the memory of lapis-lazuli and bronze-work, inlaid
agates and labyrinthine sculpture, cloisters tenantless in silence, fair
painted faces smiling from dark corners on the senseless crowd, trim
gardens with rows of pink primroses in spring, and of begonia in
autumn, blooming beneath colonnades of glowing terra-cotta. The
striking contrast between the Gothic of the interior and the Renaissance
façade, each in its own kind perfect, will also be remembered; and
thoughts of the two great houses, Visconti and Sforza, to whose pride
of power it is a monument, may be blended with the recollection of
art-treasures alien to their spirit.
Two great artists, Ambrogio Borgognone and Antonio Amadeo, are the
presiding genii of the Certosa. To minute criticism, based upon the
accurate investigation of records and the comparison of styles, must be
left the task of separating their work from that of numerous
collaborators. But it is none the less certain that the keynote of the
whole music is struck by them, Amadeo, the master of the Colleoni
chapel at Bergamo, was both sculptor and architect. If the façade of the
Certosa be not absolutely his creation, he had a hand in the distribution
of its masses and the detail of its ornaments. The only fault in this
otherwise faultless product of the purest quattrocento inspiration, is that
the façade is a frontispiece, with hardly any structural relation to the
church it masks: and this, though serious from the point of view of
architecture, is no abatement of its sculpturesque and picturesque
refinement. At first sight it seems a wilderness of loveliest reliefs and
statues--of angel faces, fluttering raiment, flowing hair, love-laden
youths, and stationary figures of grave saints, mid wayward tangles of
acanthus and wild vine and cupid-laden foliage; but the subordination
of these decorative details to the main design, clear, rhythmical, and
lucid, like a chaunt of Pergolese or Stradella, will enrapture one who
has the sense for unity evoked from divers elements, for thought
subduing all caprices to the harmony of beauty. It is not possible
elsewhere in Italy to find the instinct of the earlier Renaissance, so
amorous in its expenditure of rare material, so lavish in its bestowal of
the costliest workmanship on ornamental episodes, brought into truer
keeping with a pure and simple structural effect.
All the great sculptor-architects of Lombardy worked in succession on
this miracle of beauty; and this may account for the sustained
perfection of style, which nowhere suffers from the languor of
exhaustion in the artist or from repetition of motives. It remains the
triumph of North Italian genius, exhibiting qualities of tenderness and
self-abandonment to inspiration, which we lack in the severer
masterpieces of the Tuscan school.
To Borgognone is assigned the painting of the roof in nave and
choir--exceeding rich, varied, and withal in sympathy with stately
Gothic style. Borgognone again is said to have designed the saints and
martyrs worked in tarsia for the choir-stalls. His frescoes are in some
parts well preserved, as in the lovely little Madonna at the end of the
south chapel, while the great fresco above the window in the south
transept has an historical value that renders it interesting in spite of
partial decay. Borgognone's oil pictures throughout the church prove, if
such proof were needed after inspection of the altar-piece in our
National Gallery, that he was one of the most powerful and original
painters of Italy, blending the repose of the earlier masters and their
consummate workmanship with a profound sensibility to the finest
shades of feeling and the rarest forms of natural beauty. He selected an
exquisite type of face for his young men and women; on his old men he
bestowed singular gravity and dignity. His saints are a society of strong,
pure, restful, earnest souls, in whom the passion of deepest emotion is
transfigured by habitual calm. The brown and golden harmonies he
loved, are gained without sacrifice of lustre: there is a self-restraint in
his colouring which corresponds to the reserve of his emotion; and
though a regret sometimes rises in our mind that he should have
modelled the light and shade upon his faces with a brusque, unpleasing
hardness, their pallor dwells within our memory as something
delicately sought if not consummately attained. In a word, Borgognone
was a true Lombard of the best time. The very imperfection of his
flesh-painting repeats in colour what the greatest Lombard sculptors
sought in stone--a sharpness of relief that passes over into angularity.
This brusqueness was the counterpoise to tenderness of feeling and
intensity of fancy in these northern artists. Of all Borgognone's pictures
in the Certosa I should select the altar-piece of S. Siro with S.
Lawrence and S. Stephen and two Fathers of the Church, for its fusion
of this master's qualities.
The Certosa is a wilderness of lovely workmanship. From
Borgognone's majesty we pass into the quiet region of Luini's Christian
grace, or mark the influence of Lionardo on that rare Assumption of
Madonna by his pupil, Andrea Solari. Like everything touched by the
Lionardesque spirit, this great picture was left unfinished: yet Northern
Italy has nothing finer to show than the landscape, outspread in its
immeasurable purity of calm, behind the grouped Apostles and the
ascendant Mother of Heaven. The feeling of that happy region between
the Alps and Lombardy, where there are many waters--et tacitos sine
labe laous sine murmure rivos--and where the last spurs of the
mountains sink in undulations to the plain, has passed into this azure
vista, just as all Umbria is suggested in a twilight background of young
Raphael or Perugino.
The portraits of the Dukes of Milan and their families carry us into a
very different realm of feeling. Medallions above the doors of sacristy
and chancel, stately figures reared aloft beneath gigantic canopies, men
and women slumbering with folded hands upon their marble biers--we
read in all those sculptured forms a strange record of human
restlessness, resolved into the quiet of the tomb. The iniquities of Gian
Galeazzo Visconti, il gran Biscione, the blood-thirst of Gian Maria, the
dark designs of Filippo and his secret vices, Francesco Sforza's treason,
Galeazzo Maria's vanities and lusts; their tyrants' dread of thunder and
the knife; their awful deaths by pestilence and the assassin's poignard;
their selfishness, oppression, cruelty and fraud; the murders of their
kinsmen; their labyrinthine plots and acts of broken faith;--all is
tranquil now, and we can say to each what Bosola found for the
Duchess of Malfi ere her execution:-Much you had of land and rent; Your length in clay's now competent:
A long war disturbed your mind; Here your perfect peace is signed!
Some of these faces are commonplace, with bourgeois cunning written
on the heavy features; one is bluff, another stolid, a third bloated, a
fourth stately. The sculptors have dealt fairly with all, and not one has
the lineaments of utter baseness. To Cristoforo Solari's statues of
Lodovico Sforza and his wife, Beatrice d'Este, the palm of excellence
in art and of historical interest must be awarded. Sculpture has rarely
been more dignified and true to life than here. The woman with her
short clustering curls, the man with his strong face, are resting after that
long fever which brought woe to Italy, to Europe a new age, and to the
boasted minion of Fortune a slow death in the prison palace of Loches.
Attired in ducal robes, they lie in state; and the sculptor has carved the
lashes on their eyelids, heavy with death's marmoreal sleep. He at least
has passed no judgment on their crimes. Let us too bow and leave their
memories to the historian's pen, their spirits to God's mercy.
After all wanderings in this Temple of Art, we return to Antonio
Amadeo, to his long-haired seraphs playing on the lutes of Paradise, to
his angels of the Passion with their fluttering robes and arms outspread
in agony, to his saints and satyrs mingled on pilasters of the marble
doorways, his delicate Lavabo decorations, and his hymns of piety
expressed in noble forms of weeping women and dead Christs.
Wherever we may pass, this master-spirit of the Lombard style
enthralls attention. His curious treatment of drapery as though it ¦were
made of crumpled paper, and his trick of enhancing relief by sharp
angles and attenuated limbs, do not detract from his peculiar charm.
That is his way, very different from Donatello's, of attaining to the
maximum of life and lightness in the stubborn vehicle of stone. Nor do
all the riches of the choir--those multitudes of singing angels, those
Ascensions and Assumptions, and innumerable basreliefs of gleaming
marble moulded into softest wax by mastery of art--distract our eyes
from the single round medallion, not larger than a common plate,
inscribed by him upon the front of the high altar. Perhaps, if one who
loved Amadeo were bidden to point out his masterpiece, he would lead
the way at once to this. The space is small: yet it includes the whole
tragedy of the Passion. Christ is lying dead among the women on his
mother's lap, and there are pitying angels in the air above. One woman
lifts his arm, another makes her breast a pillow for his head. Their
agony is hushed, but felt in every limb and feature; and the extremity of
suffering is seen in each articulation of the worn and wounded form
just taken from the cross. It would be too painful, were not the harmony
of art so rare, the interlacing of those many figures in a simple round so
exquisite. The noblest tranquillity and the most passionate emotion are
here fused in a manner of adorable naturalness.
From the church it is delightful to escape into the cloisters, flooded
with sunlight, where the swallows skim, and the brown hawks circle,
and the mason bees are at work upon their cells among the carvings.
The arcades of the two cloisters are the final triumph of Lombard
terra-cotta. The memory fails before such infinite invention, such
facility and felicity of execution. Wreaths of cupids gliding round the
arches among grape-bunches and bird-haunted foliage of vine; rows of
angels, like rising and setting planets, some smiling and some grave,
ascending and descending by the Gothic curves; saints stationary on
their pedestals, and faces leaning from the rounds above; crowds of
cherubs, and courses of stars, and acanthus leaves in woven lines, and
ribands incessantly inscribed with Ave Maria! Then, over all, the rich
red light and purple shadows of the brick, than which no substance
sympathises more completely with the sky of solid blue above, the
broad plain space of waving summer grass beneath our feet.
It is now late afternoon, and when evening comes, the train will take us
back to Milan. There is yet a little while to rest tired eyes and strained
spirits among the willows and the poplars by the monastery wall.
Through that grey-green leafage, young with early spring, the pinnacles
of the Certosa leap like flames into the sky. The rice-fields are under
water, far and wide, shining like burnished gold beneath the level light
now near to sun-down. Frogs are croaking; those persistent frogs,
whom the Muses have ordained to sing for aye, in spite of Bion and all
tuneful poets dead. We sit and watch the water-snakes, the busy rats,
the hundred creatures swarming in the fat well-watered soil.
Nightingales here and there, new-comers, tune their timid April song:
but, strangest of all sounds in such a place, my comrade from the
Grisons jodels forth an Alpine cowherd's melody. Auf den Alpen
droben ist ein herrliches Leben!
Did the echoes of Gian Galeazzo's convent ever wake to such a tune as
this before?
SAN MAURIZIO
The student of art in Italy, after mastering the characters of different
styles and epochs, finds a final satisfaction in the contemplation of
buildings designed and decorated by one master, or by groups of artists
interpreting the spirit of a single period. Such supreme monuments of
the national genius are not very common, and they are therefore the
more precious. Giotto's Chapel at Padua; the Villa Farnesina at Rome,
built by Peruzzi and painted in fresco by Raphael and Sodoma; the
Palazzo del Te at Mantua, Giulio Romano's masterpiece; the Scuola di
San Rocco, illustrating the Venetian Renaissance at its climax, might
be cited among the most splendid of these achievements. In the church
of the Monastero Maggiore at Milan, dedicated to S. Maurizio,
Lombard architecture and fresco-painting may be studied in this rare
combination. The monastery itself, one of the oldest in Milan, formed a
retreat for cloistered virgins following the rule of S. Benedict. It may
have been founded as early as the tenth century; but its church was
rebuilt in the first two decades of the sixteenth, between 1503 and 1519,
and was immediately afterwards decorated with frescoes by Luini and
his pupils. Gian Giacomo Dolcebono, architect and sculptor, called by
his fellow-craftsmen magistro di taliare pietre, gave the design, at once
simple and harmonious, which was carried out with hardly any
deviation from his plan. The church is a long parallelogram, divided
into two unequal portions, the first and smaller for the public, the
second for the nuns. The walls are pierced with rounded and pilastered
windows, ten on each side, four of which belong to the outer and six to
the inner section. The dividing wall or septum rises to the point from
which the groinings of the roof spring; and round three sides of the
whole building, north, east, and south, runs a gallery for the use of the
convent. The altars of the inner and outer church are placed against the
septum, back to back, with certain differences of structure that need not
be described. Simple and severe, S. Maurizio owes its architectural
beauty wholly and entirely to purity of line and perfection of proportion.
There is a prevailing spirit of repose, a sense of space, fair, lightsome,
and adapted to serene moods of the meditative fancy in this building,
which is singularly at variance with the religious mysticism and
imaginative grandeur of a Gothic edifice. The principal beauty of the
church, however, is its tone of colour. Every square inch is covered
with fresco or rich woodwork, mellowed by time into that harmony of
tints which blends the work of greater and lesser artists in one golden
hue of brown. Round the arcades of the convent-loggia run delicate
arabesques with faces of fair female saints--Catherine, Agnes, Lucy,
Agatha,--gem-like or star-like, gazing from their gallery upon the
church below. The Luinesque smile is on their lips and in their eyes,
quiet, refined, as though the emblems of their martyrdom brought back
no thought of pain to break the Paradise of rest in which they dwell.
There are twenty-six in all, a sisterhood of stainless souls, the lilies of
Love's garden planted round Christ's throne. Soldier saints are mingled
with them in still smaller rounds above the windows, chosen to
illustrate the virtues of an order which renounced the world. To decide
whose hand produced these masterpieces of Lombard suavity and grace,
or whether more than one, would not be easy. Near the altar we can
perhaps trace the style of Bartolommeo Suardi in an Annunciation
painted on the spandrils--that heroic style, large and noble, known to us
by the chivalrous S. Martin and the glorified Madonna of the Brera
frescoes. It is not impossible that the male saints of the loggia may be
also his, though a tenderer touch, a something more nearly
Lionardesque in its quietude, must be discerned in Lucy and her sisters.
The whole of the altar in this inner church belongs to Luini. Were it not
for darkness and decay, we should pronounce this series of the Passion
in nine great compositions, with saints and martyrs and torch-bearing
genii, to be one of his most ambitious and successful efforts. As it is,
we can but judge in part; the adolescent beauty of Sebastian, the grave
compassion of S. Rocco, the classical perfection of the cupid with
lighted tapers, the gracious majesty of women smiling on us sideways
from their Lombard eyelids--these remain to haunt our memory,
emerging from the shadows of the vault above.
The inner church, as is fitting, excludes all worldly elements. We are in
the presence of Christ's agony, relieved and tempered by the sunlight of
those beauteous female faces. All is solemn here, still as the convent,
pure as the meditations of a novice. We pass the septum, and find
ourselves in the outer church appropriated to the laity. Above the high
altar the whole wall is covered with Luini's loveliest work, in excellent
light and far from ill preserved. The space divides into eight
compartments. A Pietà, an Assumption, Saints and Founders of the
church, group themselves under the influence of Luini's harmonising
colour into one symphonious whole. But the places of distinction are
reserved for two great benefactors of the convent, Alessandro de'
Bentivogli and his wife, Ippolita Sforza. When the Bentivogli were
expelled from Bologna by the Papal forces, Alessandro settled at Milan,
where he dwelt, honoured by the Sforzas and allied to them by
marriage, till his death in 1532. He was buried in the monastery by the
side of his sister Alessandra, a nun of the order. Luini has painted the
illustrious exile in his habit as he lived. He is kneeling, as though in
ever-during adoration of the altar mystery, attired in a long black
senatorial robe trimmed with furs. In his left hand he holds a book; and
above his pale, serenely noble face is a little black berretta. Saints
attend him, as though attesting to his act of faith. Opposite kneels
Ippolita, his wife, the brilliant queen of fashion, the witty leader of
society, to whom Bandello dedicated his Novelle, and whom he praised
as both incomparably beautiful and singularly learned. Her queenly
form is clothed from head to foot in white brocade, slashed and
trimmed with gold lace, and on her forehead is a golden circlet. She has
the proud port of a princess, the beauty of a woman past her prime but
stately, the indescribable dignity of attitude which no one but Luini
could have rendered so majestically sweet. In her hand is a book; and
she, like Alessandro, has her saintly sponsors, Agnes and Catherine and
S. Scolastica.
Few pictures bring the splendid Milanese Court so vividly before us as
these portraits of the Bentivogli: they are, moreover, very precious for
the light they throw on what Luini could achieve in the secular style so
rarely touched by him. Great, however, as are these frescoes, they are
far surpassed both in value and interest by his paintings in the side
chapel of S. Catherine. Here more than anywhere else, more even than
at Saronno or Lugano, do we feel the true distinction of Luini--his
unrivalled excellence as a colourist, his power over pathos, the
refinement of his feeling, and the peculiar beauty of his favourite types.
The chapel was decorated at the expense of a Milanese advocate,
Francesco Besozzi, who died in 1529. It is he who is kneeling,
grey-haired and bareheaded, under the protection of S. Catherine of
Alexandria, intently gazing at Christ unbound from the scourging pillar.
On the other side stand S. Lawrence and S. Stephen, pointing to the
Christ and looking at us, as though their lips were framed to say:
'Behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto his sorrow.' Even the
soldiers who have done their cruel work, seem softened. They untie the
cords tenderly, and support the fainting form, too weak to stand alone.
What sadness in the lovely faces of S. Catherine and Lawrence! What
divine anguish in the loosened limbs and bending body of Christ; what
piety in the adoring old man! All the moods proper to this supreme
tragedy of the faith are touched as in some tenor song with low
accompaniment of viols; for it was Luini's special province to feel
profoundly and to express musically. The very depth of the Passion is
there; and yet there is no discord.
Just in proportion to this unique faculty for yielding a melodious
representation of the most intense moments of stationary emotion, was
his inability to deal with a dramatic subject. The first episode of S.
Catherine's execution, when the wheel was broken and the executioners
struck by lightning, is painted in this chapel without energy and with a
lack of composition that betrays the master's indifference to his subject.
Far different is the second episode when Catherine is about to be
beheaded. The executioner has raised his sword to strike. She, robed in
brocade of black and gold, so cut as to display the curve of neck and
back, while the bosom is covered, leans her head above her praying
hands, and waits the blow in sweetest resignation. Two soldiers stand at
some distance in a landscape of hill and meadow; and far up are seen
the angels carrying her body to its tomb upon Mount Sinai. I cannot
find words or summon courage to describe the beauty of this picture; its
atmosphere of holy peace, the dignity of its composition, the golden
richness of its colouring. The most tragic situation has here again been
alchemised by Luini's magic into a pure idyll, without the loss of power,
without the sacrifice of edification.
S. Catherine in this incomparable fresco is a portrait, the history of
which so strikingly illustrates the relation of the arts to religion on the
one hand, and to life on the other, in the age of the Renaissance, that it
cannot be omitted. At the end of his fourth Novella, having related the
life of the Contessa di Cellant, Bandello says: 'And so the poor woman
was beheaded; such was the end of her unbridled desires; and he who
would fain see her painted to the life, let him go to the Church of the
Monistero Maggiore, and there will he behold her portrait.' The
Contessa di Cellant was the only child of a rich usurer who lived at
Casal Monferrato. Her mother was a Greek; and she was a girl of such
exquisite beauty, that, in spite of her low origin, she became the wife of
the noble Ermes Visconti in her sixteenth year. He took her to live with
him at Milan, where she frequented the house of the Bentivogli, but
none other. Her husband told Bandello that he knew her temper better
than to let her visit with the freedom of the Milanese ladies. Upon his
death, while she was little more than twenty, she retired to Casale and
led a gay life among many lovers. One of these, the Count of Cellant in
the Val d'Aosta, became her second husband, conquered by her
extraordinary loveliness. They could not, however, agree together. She
left him, and established herself at Pavia. Rich with her father's wealth
and still of most seductive beauty, she now abandoned herself to a life
of profligacy. Three among her lovers must be named: Ardizzino
Valperga, Count of Masino; Roberto Sanseverino, of the princely
Naples family; and Don Pietro di Cardona, a Sicilian. With each of the
two first she quarrelled, and separately besought each to murder the
other. They were friends and frustrated her plans by communicating
them to one another. The third loved her with the insane passion of a
very young man. What she desired, he promised to do blindly; and she
bade him murder his two predecessors in her favour. At this time she
was living at Milan, where the Duke of Bourbon was acting as viceroy
for the Emperor. Don Pietro took twenty-five armed men of his
household, and waylaid the Count of Masino, as he was returning with
his brother and eight or nine servants, late one night from supper. Both
the brothers and the greater part of their suite were killed: but Don
Pietro was caught. He revealed the atrocity of his mistress; and she was
sent to prison. Incapable of proving her innocence, and prevented from
escaping, in spite of 15,000 golden crowns with which she hoped to
bribe her jailors, she was finally beheaded. Thus did a vulgar and
infamous Messalina, distinguished only by rare beauty, furnish Luini
with a S. Catherine for this masterpiece of pious art! The thing seems
scarcely credible. Yet Bandello lived in Milan while the Church of S.
Maurizio was being painted; nor does he show the slightest sign of
disgust at the discord between the Contessa's life and her artistic
presentation in the person of a royal martyr.
A HUMANIST'S MONUMENT
In the Sculpture Gallery of the Brera is preserved a fair white marble
tomb, carved by that excellent Lombard sculptor, Agostino Busti. The
epitaph runs as follows:-En Virtutem Mortis nesciam. Vivet Lancinus Curtius Sæcula per omnia
Quascunque lustrans oras, Tantum possunt Camoenæ.
'Look here on Virtue that knows nought of Death! Lancinus Curtius
shall live through all the centuries, and visit every shore of earth. Such
power have the Muses.' The timeworn poet reclines, as though sleeping
or resting, ready to be waked; his head is covered with flowing hair,
and crowned with laurel; it leans upon his left hand. On either side of
his couch stand cupids or genii with torches turned to earth. Above is a
group of the three Graces, flanked by winged Pegasi. Higher up are
throned two Victories with palms, and at the top a naked Fame. We
need not ask who was Lancinus Curtius. He is forgotten, and his virtue
has not saved him from oblivion; though he strove in his lifetime, pro
virili parte, for the palm that Busti carved upon his grave. Yet his
monument teaches in short compass a deep lesson; and his epitaph
sums up the dream which lured the men of Italy in the Renaissance to
their doom. We see before us sculptured in this marble the ideal of the
humanistic poet-scholar's life: Love, Grace, the Muse, and Nakedness,
and Glory. There is not a single intrusive thought derived from
Christianity. The end for which the man lived was Pagan. His hope was
earthly fame. Yet his name survives, if this indeed be a survival, not in
those winged verses which were to carry him abroad across the earth,
but in the marble of a cunning craftsman, scanned now and then by a
wandering scholar's eye in the half-darkness of a vault.
THE MONUMENT OF GASTON DE FOIX IN THE BRERA
The hero of Ravenna lies stretched upon his back in the hollow of a
bier covered with laced drapery; and his head rests on richly
ornamented cushions. These decorative accessories, together with the
minute work of his scabbard, wrought in the fanciful mannerism of the
cinquecento, serve to enhance the statuesque simplicity of the young
soldier's effigy. The contrast between so much of richness in the merely
subordinate details, and this sublime severity of treatment in the person
of the hero, is truly and touchingly dramatic. There is a smile as of
content in death, upon his face; and the features are exceedingly
beautiful--with the beauty of a boy, almost of a woman. The heavy hair
is cut straight above the forehead and straight over the shoulders,
falling in massive clusters. A delicately sculptured laurel branch is
woven into a victor's crown, and laid lightly on the tresses it scarcely
seems to clasp. So fragile is this wreath that it does not break the pure
outline of the boy-conqueror's head. The armour is quite plain. So is the
surcoat. Upon the swelling bust, that seems fit harbour for a hero's heart,
there lies the collar of an order composed of cockle-shells; and this is
all the ornament given to the figure. The hands are clasped across a
sword laid flat upon the breast, and placed between the legs. Upon the
chin is a little tuft of hair, parted, and curling either way; for the victor
of Ravenna, like the Hermes of Homer, was [Greek: prôton hypênêtês],
'a youth of princely blood, whose beard hath just begun to grow, for
whom the season of bloom is in its prime of grace.' The whole statue is
the idealisation of virtù--that quality so highly prized by the Italians
and the ancients, so well fitted for commemoration in the arts. It is the
apotheosis of human life resolved into undying memory because of one
great deed. It is the supreme portrait in modern times of a young hero,
chiselled by artists belonging to a race no longer heroic, but capable of
comprehending and expressing the æsthetic charm of heroism.
Standing before it, we may say of Gaston what Arrian wrote to Hadrian
of Achilles:--'That he was a hero, if hero ever lived, I cannot doubt; for
his birth and blood were noble, and he was beautiful, and his spirit was
mighty, and he passed in youth's prime away from men.' Italian
sculpture, under the condition of the cinquecento, had indeed no more
congenial theme than this of bravery and beauty, youth and fame,
immortal honour and untimely death; nor could any sculptor of death
have poetised the theme more thoroughly than Agostino Busti, whose
simple instinct, unlike that of Michelangelo, led him to subordinate his
own imagination to the pathos of reality.
SARONNO
The church of Saronno is a pretty building with a Bramantesque cupola,
standing among meadows at some distance from the little town. It is the
object of a special cult, which draws pilgrims from the neighbouring
country-side; but the concourse is not large enough to load the
sanctuary with unnecessary wealth. Everything is very quiet in the holy
place, and the offerings of the pious seem to have been only just
enough to keep the building and its treasures of art in repair. The
church consists of a nave, a central cupola, a vestibule leading to the
choir, the choir itself, and a small tribune behind the choir. No other
single building in North Italy can boast so much that is first-rate of the
work of Luini and Gandenzio Ferrari.
The cupola is raised on a sort of drum composed of twelve pieces,
perforated with round windows and supported on four massive piers.
On the level of the eye are frescoes by Luini of S. Rocco, S. Sebastian,
S. Christopher, and S. Antony--by no means in his best style, and
inferior to all his other paintings in this church. The Sebastian, for
example, shows an effort to vary the traditional treatment of this saint.
He is tied in a sprawling attitude to a tree; and little of Luini's special
pathos or sense of beauty--the melody of idyllic grace made
spiritual--appears in him. These four saints are on the piers. Above are
frescoes from the early Bible history by Lanini, painted in continuation
of Ferrari's medallions from the story of Adam expelled from Paradise,
which fill the space beneath the cupola, leading the eye upward to
Ferrari's masterpiece.
The dome itself is crowded with a host of angels singing and playing
upon instruments of music. At each of the twelve angles of the drum
stands a coryphæus of this celestial choir, full length, with waving
drapery. Higher up, the golden-haired, broad-winged, divine creatures
are massed together, filling every square inch of the vault with colour.
Yet there is no confusion. The simplicity of the selected motive and the
necessities of the place acted like a check on Ferrari, who, in spite of
his dramatic impulse, could not tell a story coherently or fill a canvas
with harmonised variety. There is no trace of his violence here. Though
the motion of music runs through the whole multitude like a breeze,
though the joy expressed is a real tripudio celeste, not one of all these
angels flings his arms abroad or makes a movement that disturbs the
rhythm. We feel that they are keeping time and resting quietly, each in
his appointed seat, as though the sphere was circling with them round
the throne of God, who is their centre and their source of gladness.
Unlike Correggio and his imitators, Ferrari has introduced no clouds,
and has in no case made the legs of his angels prominent. It is a mass of
noble faces and voluminously robed figures, emerging each above the
other like flowers in a vase. Bach too has specific character, while all
are robust and full of life, intent upon the service set them. Their
instruments of music are all the lutes and viols, flutes, cymbals, drums,
fifes, citherns, organs, and harps that Ferrari's day could show. The
scale of colour, as usual with Ferrari, is a little heavy; nor are the tints
satisfactorily harmonised. But the vigour and invention of the whole
work would atone for minor defects of far greater consequence.
It is natural, beneath this dome, to turn aside and think one moment of
Correggio at Parma. Before the macchinisti of the seventeenth century
had vulgarised the motive, Correggio's bold attempt to paint heaven in
flight from earth--earth left behind in the persons of the Apostles
standing round the empty tomb, heaven soaring upward with a spiral
vortex into the abyss of light above--had an originality which set at
nought all criticism. There is such ecstasy of jubilation, such rapturous
rapidity of flight, that we who strain our eyes from below, feel we are
in the darkness of the grave which Mary left. A kind of controlling
rhythm for the composition is gained by placing Gabriel, Madonna, and
Christ at three points in the swirl of angels. Nevertheless,
composition--the presiding all-controlling intellect--is just what makes
itself felt by absence; and Correggio's special qualities of light and
colour have now so far vanished from the cupola of the Duomo that the,
constructive poverty is not disguised. Here if anywhere in painting, we
may apply Goethe's words--Gefühl ist Alles.
If then we return to Ferrari's angels at Saronno, we find that the painter
of Varallo chose a safer though a far more modest theme. Nor did he
expose himself to that most cruel of all degradations which the ethereal
genius of Correggio has suffered from incompetent imitators. To daub
a tawdry and superficial reproduction of those Parmese frescoes, to fill
the cupolas of Italy with veritable guazzetti di rane, was comparatively
easy; and between our intelligence and what remains of that stupendous
masterpiece of boldness, crowd a thousand memories of such ineptitude.
On the other hand, nothing but solid work and conscientious inspiration
could enable any workman, however able, to follow Ferrari in the path
struck out by him at Saronno. His cupola has had no imitator; and its
only rival is the noble pendant painted at Varallo by his own hand, of
angels in adoring anguish round the Cross.
In the ante-choir of the sanctuary are Luini's priceless frescoes of the
'Marriage of the Virgin,' and the 'Dispute with the Doctors.'[11] Their
execution is flawless, and they are perfectly preserved. If criticism
before such admirable examples of so excellent a master be permissible,
it may be questioned whether the figures are not too crowded, whether
the groups are sufficiently varied and connected by rhythmic lines. Yet
the concords of yellow and orange with blue in the 'Sposalizio,' and the
blendings of dull violet and red in the 'Disputa,' make up for much of
stiffness. Here, as in the Chapel of S. Catherine at Milan, we feel that
Luini was the greatest colourist among frescanti. In the 'Sposalizio' the
female heads are singularly noble and idyllically graceful. Some of the
young men too have Luini's special grace and abundance of golden hair.
In the 'Disputa' the gravity and dignity of old men are above all things
striking.
Passing into the choir, we find on either hand the 'Adoration of the
Magi' and the 'Purification of the Virgin,' two of Luini's divinest
frescoes. Above them in lunettes are four Evangelists and four Latin
Fathers, with four Sibyls. Time and neglect have done no damage here:
and here, again, perforce we notice perfect mastery of colour in fresco.
The blues detach themselves too much, perhaps, from the rest of the
colouring; and that is all a devil's advocate could say. It is possible that
the absence of blue makes the S. Catherine frescoes in the Monastero
Maggiore at Milan surpass all other works of Luini. But nowhere else
has he shown more beauty and variety in detail than here. The group of
women led by Joseph, the shepherd carrying the lamb upon his
shoulder, the girl with a basket of white doves, the child with an apple
on the altar-steps, the lovely youth in the foreground heedless of the
scene; all these are idyllic incidents treated with the purest, the serenest,
the most spontaneous, the truest, most instinctive sense of beauty. The
landscape includes a view of Saronno, and an episodical picture of the
'Flight into Egypt' where a white-robed angel leads the way. All these
lovely things are in the 'Purification,' which is dated Bernardinus
Lovinus pinxit, MDXXV.
The fresco of the 'Magi' is less notable in detail, and in general effect is
more spoiled by obtrusive blues. There is, however, one young man of
wholly Lionardesque loveliness, whose divine innocence of
adolescence, unalloyed by serious thought, unstirred by passions,
almost forces a comparison with Sodoma. The only painter who
approaches Luini in what may be called the Lombard, to distinguish it
from the Venetian idyll, is Sodoma; and the work of his which comes
nearest to Luini's masterpieces is the legend of S. Benedict, at Monte
Oliveto, near Siena. Yet Sodoma had not all Luini's innocence or
naïveté. If he added something slightly humorous which has an
indefinite charm, he lacked that freshness as of 'cool, meek-blooded
flowers' and boyish voices, which fascinates us in Luini. Sodoma was
closer to the earth, and feared not to impregnate what he saw of beauty
with the fiercer passions of his nature. If Luini had felt passion, who
shall say? It appears nowhere in his work, where life is toned to a
religious joyousness. When Shelley compared the poetry of the
Theocritean amourists to the perfume of the tuberose, and that of the
earlier Greek poets to 'a meadow-gale of June, which mingles the
fragrance of all the flowers of the field,' he supplied us with critical
images which may not unfairly be used to point the distinction between
Sodoma at Monte Oliveto and Luini at Saronno.
THE CASTELLO OF FERRARA
Is it possible that the patron saints of cities should mould the temper of
the people to their own likeness? S. George, the chivalrous, is
champion of Ferrara. His is the marble group above the Cathedral
porch, so feudal in its medieval pomp. He and S. Michael are painted in
fresco over the south portcullis of the Castle. His lustrous armour
gleams with Giorgionesque brilliancy from Dossi's masterpiece in the
Pinacoteca. That Ferrara, the only place in Italy where chivalry struck
any root, should have had S. George for patron, is at any rate
significant.
The best preserved relic of princely feudal life in Italy is this Castello
of the Este family, with its sombre moat, chained drawbridges, doleful
dungeons, and unnumbered tragedies, each one of which may be
compared with Parisina's history. I do not want to dwell on these things
now. It is enough to remember the Castello, built of ruddiest brick,
time-mellowed with how many centuries of sun and soft sea-air, as it
appeared upon the close of one tempestuous day. Just before evening
the rain-clouds parted and the sun flamed out across the misty Lombard
plain. The Castello burned like a hero's funeral pyre, and round its
high-built turrets swallows circled in the warm blue air. On the moat
slept shadows, mixed with flowers of sunset, tossed from pinnacle and
gable. Then the sky changed. A roof of thunder-cloud spread overhead
with the rapidity of tempest. The dying sun gathered his last strength
against it, fretting those steel-blue arches with crimson; and all the
fierce light, thrown from vault to vault of cloud, was reflected back as
from a shield, and cast in blots and patches on the buildings. The Castle
towered up rosy-red and shadowy sombre, enshrined, embosomed in
those purple clouds; and momently ran lightning forks like rapiers
through the growing mass. Everything around, meanwhile, was quiet in
the grass-grown streets. The only sound was a high, clear boy's voice
chanting an opera tune.
PETRARCH'S TOMB AT ARQUA
The drive from Este along the skirts of the Euganean Hills to Arqua
takes one through a country which is tenderly beautiful, because of its
contrast between little peaked mountains and the plain. It is not a grand
landscape. It lacks all that makes the skirts of Alps and Apennines
sublime. Its charm is a certain mystery and repose--an undefined sense
of the neighbouring Adriatic, a pervading consciousness of Venice
unseen, but felt from far away. From the terraces of Arqua the eye
ranges across olive-trees, laurels, and pomegranates on the southern
slopes, to the misty level land that melts into the sea, with churches and
tall campanili like gigantic galleys setting sail for fairyland over 'the
foam of perilous seas forlorn.' Let a blue-black shadow from a
thunder-cloud be cast upon this plain, and let one ray of sunlight strike
a solitary bell-tower;--it burns with palest flame of rose against the
steely dark, and in its slender shaft and shell-like tint of pink all Venice
is foreseen.
The village church of Arqua stands upon one of these terraces, with a
full stream of clearest water flowing by. On the little square before the
church-door, where the peasants congregate at mass-time--open to the
skies with all their stars and storms, girdled by the hills, and within
hearing of the vocal stream--is Petrarch's sepulchre. Fit resting-place
for what remains to earth of such a poet's clay! It is as though
archangels, flying, had carried the marble chest and set it down here on
the hillside, to be a sign and sanctuary for after-men. A simple
rectilinear coffin, of smooth Verona mandorlato, raised on four thick
columns, and closed by a heavy cippus-cover. Without emblems,
allegories, or lamenting genii, this tomb of the great poet, the great
awakener of Europe from mental lethargy, encircled by the hills,
beneath the canopy of heaven, is impressive beyond the power of
words. Bending here, we feel that Petrarch's own winged thoughts and
fancies, eternal and aërial, 'forms more real than living man, nurslings
of immortality,' have congregated to be the ever-ministering and
irremovable attendants on the shrine of one who, while he lived, was
purest spirit in a veil of flesh.
ON A MOUNTAIN
Milan is shining in sunset on those purple fields; and a score of cities
flash back the last red light, which shows each inequality and
undulation of Lombardy outspread four thousand feet beneath. Both
ranges, Alps and Apennines, are clear to view; and all the silvery lakes
are over-canopied and brought into one picture by flame-litten mists.
Monte Rosa lifts her crown of peaks above a belt of clouds into light of
living fire. The Mischabelhörner and the Dom rest stationary
angel-wings upon the rampart, which at this moment is the wall of
heaven. The pyramid of distant Monte Viso burns like solid amethyst
far, far away. Mont Cervin beckons to his brother, the gigantic
Finsteraarhorn, across tracts of liquid ether. Bells are rising from the
villages, now wrapped in gloom, between me and the glimmering lake.
A hush of evening silence falls upon the ridges, cliffs, and forests of
this billowy hill, ascending into wave-like crests, and toppling with
awful chasms over the dark waters of Lugano. It is good to be alone
here at this hour. Yet I must rise and go--passing through meadows,
where white lilies sleep in silvery drifts, and asphodel is pale with
spires of faintest rose, and narcissus dreams of his own beauty, loading
the air with fragrance sweet as some love-music of Mozart. These
fields want only the white figure of Persephone to make them poems:
and in this twilight one might fancy that the queen had left her throne
by Pluto's side, to mourn for her dead youth among the flowers uplifted
between earth and heaven. Nay, they are poems now, these fields; with
that unchanging background of history, romance, and human life--the
Lombard plain, against whose violet breadth the blossoms bend their
faint heads to the evening air. Downward we hurry, on pathways where
the beeches meet, by silent farms, by meadows honey-scented, deep in
dew. The columbine stands tall and still on those green slopes of
shadowy grass. The nightingale sings now, and now is hushed again.
Streams murmur through the darkness, where the growth of trees,
heavy with honeysuckle and wild rose, is thickest. Fireflies begin to flit
above the growing corn. At last the plain is reached, and all the skies
are tremulous with starlight. Alas, that we should vibrate so obscurely
to these harmonies of earth and heaven! The inner finer sense of them
seems somehow unattainable--that spiritual touch of soul evoking soul
from nature, which should transfigure our dull mood of self into
impersonal delight. Man needs to be a mytho-poet at some moments, or,
better still, to be a mystic steeped through half-unconsciousness in the
vast wonder of the world. Gold and untouched to poetry or piety by
scenes that ought to blend the spirit in ourselves with spirit in the world
without, we can but wonder how this phantom show of mystery and
beauty will pass away from us--how soon--and we be where, see what,
use all our sensibilities on aught or nought?
SIC GENIUS
In the picture-gallery at Modena there is a masterpiece of Dosso Dossi.
The frame is old and richly carved; and the painting, bordered by its
beautiful dull gold, shines with the lustre of an emerald. In his happy
moods Dosso set colour upon canvas, as no other painter out of Venice
ever did; and here he is at his happiest. The picture is the portrait of a
jester, dressed in courtly clothes and with a feathered cap upon his head.
He holds a lamb in his arms, and carries the legend, Sic Genius. Behind
him is a landscape of exquisite brilliancy and depth. His face is young
and handsome. Dosso has made it one most wonderful laugh. Even so
perhaps laughed Yorick. Nowhere else have I seen a laugh thus painted:
not violent, not loud, although the lips are opened to show teeth of
dazzling whiteness;--but fine and delicate, playing over the whole face
like a ripple sent up from the depths of the soul within. Who was he?
What does the lamb mean? How should the legend be interpreted? We
cannot answer these questions. He may have been the court-fool of
Ferrara; and his genius, the spiritual essence of the man, may have
inclined him to laugh at all things. That at least is the value he now has
for us. He is the portrait of perpetual irony, the spirit of the golden
Sixteenth Century which delicately laughed at the whole world of
thoughts and things, the quintessence of the poetry of Ariosto, the wit
of Berni, all condensed into one incarnation and immortalised by
truthfullest art. With the Gaul, the Spaniard, and the German at her
gates, and in her cities, and encamped upon her fields, Italy still
laughed; and when the voice of conscience sounding through
Savonarola asked her why, she only smiled--Sic Genius.
One evening in May we rowed from Venice to Torcello, and at sunset
broke bread and drank wine together among the rank grasses just
outside that ancient church. It was pleasant to sit in the so-called chair
of Attila and feel the placid stillness of the place. Then there came
lounging by a sturdy young fellow in brown country clothes, with a
marvellous old wide-awake upon his head, and across his shoulders a
bunch of massive church-keys. In strange contrast to his uncouth garb
he flirted a pink Japanese fan, gracefully disposing it to cool his
sunburned olive cheeks. This made us look at him. He was not ugly.
Nay, there was something of attractive in his face--the smooth-curved
chin, the shrewd yet sleepy eyes, and finely cut thin lips--a curious
mixture of audacity and meekness blent upon his features. Yet this
impression was but the prelude to his smile. When that first dawned,
some breath of humour seeming to stir in him unbidden, the true
meaning was given to his face. Each feature helped to make a smile
that was the very soul's life of the man expressed. I broadened, showing
brilliant teeth, and grew into a noiseless laugh; and then I saw before
me Dosso's jester, the type of Shakspere's fools, the life of that wild
irony, now rude, now fine, which once delighted Courts. The laughter
of the whole world and of all the centuries was silent in his face. What
he said need not be repeated. The charm was less in his words than in
his personality; for Momus-philosophy lay deep in every look and
gesture of the man. The place lent itself to irony: parties of Americans
and English parsons, the former agape for any rubbishy old things, the
latter learned in the lore of obsolete Church-furniture, had thronged
Torcello; and now they were all gone, and the sun had set behind the
Alps, while an irreverent stranger drank his wine in Attila's chair, and
nature's jester smiled--Sic Genius.
When I slept that night I dreamed of an altar-piece in the Temple of
Folly. The goddess sat enthroned beneath a canopy hung with bells and
corals. On her lap was a beautiful winged smiling genius, who
flourished two bright torches. On her left hand stood the man of
Modena with his white lamb, a new S. John. On her right stood the man
of Torcello with his keys, a new S. Peter. Both were laughing after their
all-absorbent, divine, noiseless fashion; and under both was written, Sic
Genius. Are not all things, even profanity, permissible in dreams?
*****
COMO AND IL MEDEGHINO
To which of the Italian lakes should the palm of beauty be accorded?
This question may not unfrequently have moved the idle minds of
travellers, wandering through that loveliest region from Orta to
Garda--from little Orta, with her gemlike island, rosy granite crags, and
chestnut-covered swards above the Colma; to Garda, bluest of all
waters, surveyed in majestic length from Desenzano or poetic Sirmione,
a silvery sleeping haze of hill and cloud and heaven and clear waves
bathed in modulated azure. And between these extreme points what
varied lovelinesses lie in broad Maggiore, winding Como, Varese with
the laughing face upturned to heaven, Lugano overshadowed by the
crested crags of Monte Generoso, and Iseo far withdrawn among the
rocky Alps! He who loves immense space, cloud shadows slowly
sailing over purple slopes, island gardens, distant glimpses of
snow-capped mountains, breadth, air, immensity, and flooding sunlight,
will choose Maggiore. But scarcely has he cast his vote for this, the
Juno of the divine rivals, when he remembers the triple lovelinesses of
the Larian Aphrodite, disclosed in all their placid grace from Villa
Serbelloni;--the green blue of the waters, clear as glass, opaque through
depth; the millefleurs roses clambering into cypresses by Cadenabbia;
the laburnums hanging their yellow clusters from the clefts of Sasso
Eancio; the oleander arcades of Varenna; the wild white limestone
crags of San Martiuo, which he has climbed to feast his eyes with the
perspective, magical, serene, Lionardesquely perfect, of the distant
gates of Adda. Then while this modern Paris is yet doubting, perhaps a
thought may cross his mind of sterner, solitary Lake Iseo--the Pallas of
the three. She offers her own attractions. The sublimity of Monte
Adamello, dominating Lovere and all the lowland like Hesiod's hill of
Virtue reared aloft above the plain of common life, has charms to tempt
heroic lovers. Nor can Varese be neglected. In some picturesque
respects, Varese is the most perfect of the lakes. Those long lines of
swelling hills that lead into the level, yield an infinite series of placid
foregrounds, pleasant to the eye by contrast with the dominant
snow-summits, from Monte Viso to Monte Leone: the sky is limitless
to southward; the low horizons are broken by bell-towers and
farmhouses; while armaments of clouds are ever rolling in the interval
of Alps and plain.
Of a truth, to decide which is the queen of the Italian lakes, is but an
infinita quæstio; and the mere raising of it is folly. Still each lover of
the beautiful may give his vote; and mine, like that of shepherd Paris, is
already given to the Larian goddess. Words fail in attempting to set
forth charms which have to be enjoyed, or can at best but lightly be
touched with most consummate tact, even as great poets have already
touched on Como Lake--from Virgil with his 'Lari maxume,' to
Tennyson and the Italian Manzoni. The threshold of the shrine is,
however, less consecrated ground; and the Cathedral of Como may
form a vestibule to the temple where silence is more golden than the
speech of a describer.
The Cathedral of Como is perhaps the most perfect building in Italy for
illustrating the fusion of Gothic and Renaissance styles, both of a good
type and exquisite in their sobriety. The Gothic ends with the nave. The
noble transepts and the choir, each terminating in a rounded tribune of
the same dimensions, are carried out in a simple and decorous
Bramantesque manner. The transition from the one style to the other is
managed so felicitously, and the sympathies between them are so well
developed, that there is no discord. What we here call Gothic, is
conceived in a truly southern spirit, without fantastic efflorescence or
imaginative complexity of multiplied parts; while the Renaissance
manner, as applied by Tommaso Rodari, has not yet stiffened into the
lifeless neo-Latinism of the later cinquecento: it is still distinguished by
delicate inventiveness, and beautiful subordination of decorative detail
to architectural effect. Under these happy conditions we feel that the
Gothic of the nave, with its superior severity and sombreness, dilates
into the lucid harmonies of choir and transepts like a flower unfolding.
In the one the mind is tuned to inner meditation and religious awe; in
the other the worshipper passes into a temple of the clear explicit
faith--as an initiated neophyte might be received into the meaning of
the mysteries.
After the collapse of the Roman Empire the district of Como seems to
have maintained more vividly than the rest of Northern Italy some
memory of classic art. Magistri Comacini is a title frequently inscribed
upon deeds and charters of the earlier middle ages, as synonymous with
sculptors and architects. This fact may help to account for the purity
and beauty of the Duomo. It is the work of a race in which the tradition
of delicate artistic invention had never been wholly interrupted. To
Tommaso Rodari and his brothers, Bernardino and Jacopo, the world
owes this sympathetic fusion of the Gothic and the Bramantesque styles;
and theirs too is the sculpture with which the Duomo is so richly
decorated. They were natives of Maroggia, a village near Mendrisio,
beneath the crests of Monte Generoso, close to Campione, which sent
so many able craftsmen out into the world between the years 1300 and
1500. Indeed the name of Campionesi would probably have been given
to the Rodari, had they left their native province for service in Eastern
Lombardy. The body of the Duomo had been finished when Tommaso
Rodari was appointed master of the fabric in 1487. To complete the
work by the addition of a tribune was his duty. He prepared a wooden
model and exposed it, after the fashion of those times, for criticism in
his bottega; and the usual difference of opinion arose among the
citizens of Como concerning its merits. Cristoforo Solaro, surnamed Il
Gobbo, was called in to advise. It may be remembered that when
Michelangelo first placed his Pietà in S. Peter's, rumour gave it to this
celebrated Lombard sculptor, and the Florentine was constrained to set
his own signature upon the marble. The same Solaro carved the
monument of Beatrice Sforza in the Certosa of Pavia. He was indeed in
all points competent to criticise or to confirm the design of his
fellow-craftsman. Il Gobbo disapproved of the proportions chosen by
Rodari, and ordered a new model to be made; but after much discussion,
and some concessions on the part of Rodari, who is said to have
increased the number of the windows and lightened the orders of his
model, the work was finally entrusted to the master of Maroggia.
Not less creditable than the general design of the tribune is the
sculpture executed by the brothers. The north side door is a
master-work of early Renaissance chiselling, combining mixed
Christian and classical motives with a wealth of floral ornament. Inside,
over the same door, is a procession of children seeming to represent the
Triumph of Bacchus, with perhaps some Christian symbolism.
Opposite, above the south door, is a frieze of fighting Tritons--horsed
sea deities pounding one another with bunches of fish and splashing the
water, in Mantegna's spirit. The doorways of the façade are decorated
with the same rare workmanship; and the canopies, supported by naked
fauns and slender twisted figures, under which the two Plinies are
seated, may be reckoned among the supreme achievements of delicate
Renaissance sculpture. The Plinies are not like the work of the same
master. They are older, stiffer, and more Gothic. The chief interest
attaching to them is that they are habited and seated after the fashion of
Humanists. This consecration of the two Pagan saints beside the portals
of the Christian temple is truly characteristic of the fifteenth century in
Italy. Beneath, are little basreliefs representing scenes from their
respective lives, in the style of carved predellas on the altars of saints.
The whole church is peopled with detached statues, among which a
Sebastian in the Chapel of the Madonna must be mentioned as
singularly beautiful. It is a finely modelled figure, with the full life and
exuberant adolescence of Venetian inspiration. A peculiar feature of the
external architecture is the series of Atlantes, bearing on their shoulders
urns, heads of lions, and other devices, and standing on brackets round
the upper cornice just below the roof. They are of all sorts; young and
old, male and female; classically nude, and boldly outlined. These
water-conduits, the work of Bernardo Bianco and Francesco Rusca,
illustrate the departure of the earlier Renaissance from the Gothic style.
They are gargoyles; but they have lost the grotesque element. At the
same time the sculptor, while discarding Gothic tradition, has not
betaken himself yet to a servile imitation of the antique. He has used
invention, and substituted for grinning dragons' heads something wild
and bizarre of his own in harmony with classic taste.
The pictures in the chapels, chiefly by Luini and Ferrari--an idyllic
Nativity, with faun-like shepherds and choirs of angels--a sumptuous
adoration of the Magi--a jewelled Sposalizio with abundance of golden
hair flowing over draperies of green and crimson--will interest those
who are as yet unfamiliar with Lombard painting. Yet their
architectural setting, perhaps, is superior to their intrinsic merit as
works of art; and their chief value consists in adding rare dim flakes of
colour to the cool light of the lovely church. More curious, because less
easily matched, is the gilded woodwork above the altar of S. Abondio,
attributed to a German carver, but executed for the most part in the
purest Luinesque manner. The pose of the enthroned Madonna, the type
and gesture of S. Catherine, and the treatment of the Pietà above, are
thoroughly Lombard, showing how Luini's ideal of beauty could be
expressed in carving. Some of the choicest figures in the Monastero
Maggiore at Milan seem to have descended from the walls and stepped
into their tabernacles on this altar. Yet the style is not maintained
consistently. In the reliefs illustrating the life of S. Abondio we miss
Luini's childlike grace, and find instead a something that reminds us of
Donatello--a seeking after the classical in dress, carriage, and grouping
of accessory figures. It may have been that the carver, recognising
Luini's defective composition, and finding nothing in that master's
manner adapted to the spirit of relief, had the good taste to render what
was Luinesquely lovely in his female figures, and to fall back on a
severer model for his basreliefs.
The building-fund for the Duomo was raised in Como and its districts.
Boxes were placed in all the churches to receive the alms of those who
wished to aid the work. The clergy begged in Lent, and preached the
duty of contributing on special days. Presents of lime and bricks and
other materials were thankfully received. Bishops, canons, and
municipal magistrates were expected to make costly gifts on taking
office. Notaries, under penalty of paying 100 soldi if they neglected
their engagement, were obliged to persuade testators, cum bonis modis
dulciter, to inscribe the Duomo on their wills. Fines for various
offences were voted to the building by the city. Each new burgher paid
a certain sum; while guilds and farmers of the taxes bought monopolies
and privileges at the price of yearly subsidies. A lottery was finally
established for the benefit of the fabric. Of course each payment to the
good work carried with it spiritual privileges; and so willingly did the
people respond to the call of the Church, that during the sixteenth
century the sums subscribed amounted to 200,000 golden crowns.
Among the most munificent donators are mentioned the Marchese
Giacomo Gallio, who bequeathed 290,000 lire, and a Benzi, who gave
10,000 ducats.
While the people of Como were thus straining every nerve to complete
a pious work, which at the same time is one of the most perfect
masterpieces of Italian art, their lovely lake was turned into a pirate's
stronghold, and its green waves stained with slaughter of conflicting
navies. So curious is this episode in the history of the Larian lake that it
is worth while to treat of it at some length. Moreover, the lives of few
captains of adventure offer matter more rich in picturesque details and
more illustrative of their times than that of Gian Giacomo de' Medici,
the Larian corsair, long known and still remembered as Il Medeghino.
He was born in Milan in 1498, at the beginning of that darkest and
most disastrous period of Italian history, when the old fabric of social
and political existence went to ruin under the impact of conflicting
foreign armies. He lived on until the year 1555, witnessing and taking
part in the dismemberment of the Milanese Duchy, playing a game of
hazard at high stakes for his own profit with the two last Sforzas, the
Empire, the French, and the Swiss. At the beginning of the century,
while he was still a youth, the rich valley of the Valtelline, with Bormio
and Chiavenna, had been assigned to the Grisons. The Swiss Cantons at
the same time had possessed themselves of Lugano and Bellinzona. By
these two acts of robbery the mountaineers tore a portion of its fairest
territory from the Duchy; and whoever ruled in Milan, whether a Sforza,
or a Spanish viceroy, or a French general, was impatient to recover the
lost jewel of the ducal crown. So much has to be premised, because the
scene of our hero's romantic adventures was laid upon the borderland
between the Duchy and the Cantons. Intriguing at one time with the
Duke of Milan, at another with his foes the French or Spaniards, Il
Medeghino found free scope for his peculiar genius in a guerilla
warfare, carried on with the avowed purpose of restoring the Valtelline
to Milan. To steer a plain course through that chaos of politics, in
which the modern student, aided by the calm clear lights of history and
meditation, cannot find a clue, was of course impossible for an
adventurer whose one aim was to gratify his passions and exalt himself
at the expense of others. It is therefore of little use to seek motives of
statecraft or of patriotism in the conduct of Il Medeghino. He was a
man shaped according to Machiavelli's standard of political
morality--self-reliant, using craft and force with cold indifference to
moral ends, bent only upon wringing for himself the largest share of
this world's power for men who, like himself, identified virtue with
unflinching and immitigable egotism.
Il Medeghino's father was Bernardo de' Medici, a Lombard, who
neither claimed nor could have proved cousinship with the great
Medicean family of Florence. His mother was Cecilia Serbelloni. The
boy was educated in the fashionable humanistic studies, nourishing his
young imagination with the tales of Roman heroes. The first exploit by
which he proved his virtù, was the murder of a man he hated, at the age
of sixteen. This 'virile act of vengeance,' as it was called, brought him
into trouble, and forced him to choose the congenial profession of arms.
At a time when violence and vigour passed for manliness, a spirited
assassination formed the best of introductions to the captains of mixed
mercenary troops. Il Medeghino rose in favour with his generals,
helped to reinstate Francesco Sforza in his capital, and, returning
himself to Milan, inflicted severe vengeance on the enemies who had
driven him to exile. It was his ambition, at this early period of his life,
to be made governor of the Castle of Musso, on the Lake of Como.
While fighting in the neighbourhood, he had observed the unrivalled
capacities for defence presented by its site; and some pre-vision of his
future destinies now urged him to acquire it, as the basis for the free
marauding life he planned. The headland of Musso lies about halfway
between Gravedona and Menaggio, on the right shore of the Lake of
Como. Planted on a pedestal of rock, and surmounted by a sheer cliff,
there then stood a very ancient tower, commanding this promontory on
the side of the land. Between it and the water the Visconti, in more
recent days, had built a square fort; and the headland had been further
strengthened by the addition of connecting walls and bastions pierced
for cannon. Combining precipitous cliffs, strong towers, and easy
access from the lake below, this fortress of Musso was exactly the fit
station for a pirate. So long as he kept the command of the lake, he had
little to fear from land attacks, and had a splendid basis for aggressive
operations. Il Medeghino made his request to the Duke of Milan; but
the foxlike Sforza would not grant him a plain answer. At length he
hinted that if his suitor chose to rid him of a troublesome subject, the
noble and popular Astore Visconti, he should receive Musso for
payment. Crimes of bloodshed and treason sat lightly on the
adventurer's conscience. In a short time he compassed the young
Visconti's death, and claimed his reward. The Duke despatched him
thereupon to Musso, with open letters to the governor, commanding
him to yield the castle to the bearer. Private advice, also entrusted to Il
Medeghino, bade the governor, on the contrary, cut the bearer's throat.
The young man, who had the sense to read the Duke's letter, destroyed
the secret document, and presented the other, or, as one version of the
story goes, forged a ducal order in his own favour.[12] At any rate, the
castle was placed in his hands; and affecting to know nothing of the
Duke's intended treachery, Il Medeghino took possession of it as a
trusted servant of the ducal crown.
As soon as he was settled in his castle, the freebooter devoted all his
energies to rendering it still more impregnable by strengthening the
walls and breaking the cliffs into more horrid precipices. In this work
he was assisted by his numerous friends and followers; for Musso
rapidly became, like ancient Rome, an asylum for the ruffians and
outlaws of neighbouring provinces. It is even said that his sisters,
Clarina and Margherita, rendered efficient aid with manual labour. The
mention of Clarina's name justifies a parenthetical side-glance at Il
Medeghino's pedigree, which will serve to illustrate the exceptional
conditions of Italian society during this age. She was married to the
Count Giberto Borromeo, and became the mother of the pious Carlo
Borromeo, whose shrine is still adored at Milan in the Duomo. Il
Medeghino's brother, Giovan Angelo, rose to the Papacy, assuming the
title of Pius IV. Thus this murderous marauder was the brother of a
Pope and the uncle of a Saint; and these three persons of one family
embraced the various degrees and typified the several characters which
flourished with peculiar lustre in Renaissance Italy--the captain of
adventure soaked in blood, the churchman unrivalled for intrigue, and
the saint aflame with holiest enthusiasm. Il Medeghino was short of
stature, but well made and powerful; broad-chested; with a penetrating
voice and winning countenance. He dressed simply, like one of his own
soldiers; slept but little; was insensible to carnal pleasure; and though
he knew how to win the affection of his men by jovial speech, he
maintained strict discipline in his little army. In all points he was an
ideal bandit chief, never happy unless fighting or planning campaigns,
inflexible of purpose, bold and cunning in the execution of his schemes,
cruel to his enemies, generous to his followers, sacrificing all
considerations, human and divine, to the one aim of his life,
self-aggrandisement by force and intrigue. He knew well how to make
himself both feared and respected. One instance of his dealing will
suffice. A gentleman of Bellano, Polidoro Boldoni, in return to his
advances, coldly replied that he cared for neither amity nor relationship
with thieves and robbers; whereupon Il Medeghino extirpated his
family, almost to a man.
Soon after his settlement in Musso, Il Medeghino, wishing to secure the
gratitude of the Duke, his master, began war with the Grisons. From
Coire, from the Engadine, and from Davos, the Alpine pikemen were
now pouring down to swell the troops of Francis I.; and their road lay
through the Lake of Como. Il Medeghino burned all the boats upon the
lake, except those which he took into his own service, and thus made
himself master of the water passage. He then swept the 'length of lordly
Lario' from Colico to Lecco, harrying the villages upon the shore, and
cutting off the bands of journeying Switzers at his pleasure. Not content
with this guerilla, he made a descent upon the territory of the Trepievi,
and pushed far up towards Chiavenna, forcing the Grisons to recall
their troops from the Milanese. These acts of prowess convinced the
Duke that he had found a strong ally in the pirate chief. When Francis I.
continued his attacks upon the Duchy, and the Grisons still adhered to
their French paymaster, the Sforza formally invested Gian Giacomo de'
Medici with the perpetual governorship of Musso, the Lake of Como,
and as much as he could wrest from the Grisons above the lake.
Furnished now with a just title for his depredations, Il Medeghino
undertook the siege of Chiavenna. That town is the key to the valleys of
the Splügen and Bregaglia. Strongly fortified and well situated for
defence, the burghers of the Grisons well knew that upon its possession
depended their power in the Italian valleys. To take it by assault was
impossible, Il Medeghino used craft, entered the castle, and soon had
the city at his disposition. Nor did he lose time in sweeping Val
Bregaglia. The news of this conquest recalled the Switzers from the
Duchy; and as they hurried homeward just before the battle of Pavia, it
may be affirmed that Gian Giacomo de' Medici was instrumental in the
defeat and capture of the French King. The mountaineers had no great
difficulty in dislodging their pirate enemy from Chiavenna, the
Valtelline, and Val Bregaglia. But he retained his hold on the Trepievi,
occupied the Valsassina, took Porlezza, and established himself still
more strongly in Musso as the corsair monarch of the lake.
The tyranny of the Sforzas in Milan was fast going to pieces between
France and Spain; and in 1526 the Marquis of Pescara occupied the
capital in the name of Charles V. The Duke, meanwhile, remained a
prisoner in his Castello. Il Medeghino was now without a master; for he
refused to acknowledge the Spaniards, preferring to watch events and
build his own power on the ruins of the dukedom. At the head of 4,000
men, recruited from the lakes and neighbouring valleys, he swept the
country far and wide, and occupied the rich champaign of the Brianza.
He was now lord of the lakes of Como and Lugano, and absolute in
Lecco and the adjoining valleys. The town of Como itself alone
belonged to the Spaniards; and even Como was blockaded by the navy
of the corsair. Il Medeghino had a force of seven big ships, with three
sails and forty-eight oars, bristling with guns and carrying marines. His
flagship was a large brigantine, manned by picked rowers, from the
mast of which floated the red banner with the golden palle of the
Medicean arms. Besides these larger vessels, he commanded a flotilla
of countless small boats. It is clear that to reckon with him was a
necessity. If he could not be put down with force, he might be bought
over by concessions. The Spaniards adopted the second course, and Il
Medeghino, judging that the cause of the Sforza family was desperate,
determined in 1528 to attach himself to the Empire. Charles V. invested
him with the Castle of Musso and the larger part of Como Lake,
including the town of Lecco. He now assumed the titles of Marquis of
Musso and Count of Lecco: and in order to prove his sovereignty
before the world, he coined money with his own name and devices.
It will be observed that Gian Giacomo de' Medici had hitherto acted
with a single-hearted view to his own interests. At the age of thirty he
had raised himself from nothing to a principality, which, though petty,
might compare with many of some name in Italy--with Carpi, for
example, or Mirandola, or Camerino. Nor did he mean to remain quiet
in the prime of life. He regarded Como Lake as the mere basis for more
arduous undertakings. Therefore, when the whirligig of events restored
Francesco Sforza to his duchy in 1529, Il Medeghino refused to obey
his old lord. Pretending to move under the Duke's orders, but really
acting for himself alone, he proceeded to attack his ancient enemies, the
Grisons. By fraud and force he worked his way into their territory,
seized Morbegno, and overran the Valtelline. He was destined,
however, to receive a serious check. Twelve thousand Switzers rose
against him on the one hand, on the other the Duke of Milan sent a
force by land and water to subdue his rebel subject, while Alessandro
Gonzaga marched upon his castles in the Brianza. He was thus assailed
by formidable forces from three quarters, converging upon the Lake of
Como, and driving him to his chosen element, the water. Hastily
quitting the Valtelline, he fell back to the Castle of Mandello on the
lake, collected his navy, and engaged the ducal ships in a battle off
Menaggio. In this battle he was worsted. But he did not lose his
courage. From Bellagio, from Varenna, from Bellano he drove forth his
enemies, rolled the cannon of the Switzers into the lake, regained Lecco,
defeated the troops of Alessandro Gonzaga, and took the Duke of
Mantua prisoner. Had he but held Como, it is probable that he might
have obtained such terms at this time as would have consolidated his
tyranny. The town of Como, however, now belonged to the Duke of
Milan, and formed an excellent basis for operations against the pirate.
Overmatched, with an exhausted treasury and broken forces, Il
Medeghino was at last compelled to give in. Yet he retired with all the
honours of war. In exchange for Musso and the lake, the Duke agreed
to give him 35,000 golden crowns, together with the feud and
marquisate of Marignano. A free pardon was promised not only to
himself and his brothers, but to all his followers; and the Duke further
undertook to transport his artillery and munitions of war at his own
expense to Marignano. Having concluded this treaty under the auspices
of Charles V. and his lieutenant, Il Medeghino, in March 1532, set sail
from Musso, and turned his back upon the lake for ever. The Switzers
immediately destroyed the towers, forts, walls, and bastions of the
Musso promontory, leaving in the midst of their ruins the little chapel
of S. Eufemia.
Gian Giacomo de' Medici, henceforth known to Europe as the Marquis
of Marignano, now took service under Spain; and through the favour of
Anton de Leyva, Viceroy for the Duchy, rose to the rank of Field
Marshal. When the Marquis del Vasto succeeded to the Spanish
governorship of Milan in 1536, he determined to gratify an old grudge
against the ex-pirate, and, having invited him to a banquet, made him
prisoner. II Medeghino was not, however, destined to languish in a
dungeon. Princes and kings interested themselves in his fate. He was
released, and journeyed to the court of Charles V. in Spain. The
Emperor received him kindly, and employed him first in the Low
Countries, where he helped to repress the burghers of Ghent, and at the
siege of Landrecy commanded the Spanish artillery against other Italian
captains of adventure: for, Italy being now dismembered and enslaved,
her sons sought foreign service where they found best pay and widest
scope for martial science. Afterwards the Medici ruled Bohemia as
Spanish Viceroy; and then, as general of the league formed by the Duke
of Florence, the Emperor, and the Pope to repress the liberties of
Tuscany, distinguished himself in that cruel war of extermination,
which turned the fair Contado of Siena into a poisonous Maremma. To
the last Il Medeghino preserved the instincts and the passions of a
brigand chief. It was at this time that, acting for the Grand Duke of
Tuscany, he first claimed open kinship with the Medici of Florence.
Heralds and genealogists produced a pedigree, which seemed to
authorise this pretension; he was recognised, together with his brother,
Pius IV., as an offshoot of the great house which had already given
Dukes to Florence, Kings to France, and two Popes to the Christian
world. In the midst of all this foreign service he never forgot his old
dream of conquering the Valtelline; and in 1547 he made proposals to
the Emperor for a new campaign against the Grisons. Charles V. did
not choose to engage in a war, the profits of which would have been
inconsiderable for the master of half the civilised world, and which
might have proved troublesome by stirring up the tameless Switzers. Il
Medeghino was obliged to abandon a project cherished from the
earliest dawn of his adventurous manhood.
When Gian Giacomo died in 1555, his brother Battista succeeded to his
claims upon Lecco and the Trepievi. His monument, magnificent with
five bronze figures, the masterpiece of Leone Lioni, from Menaggio,
Michelangelesque in style, and of consummate workmanship, still
adorns the Duomo of Milan. It stands close by the door that leads to the
roof. This mausoleum, erected to the memory of Gian Giacomo and his
brother Gabrio, is said to have cost 7800 golden crowns. On the
occasion of the pirate's funeral the Senate of Milan put on mourning,
and the whole city followed the great robber, the hero of Renaissance
virtù, to the grave.
Between the Cathedral of Como and the corsair Medeghino there is but
a slight link. Yet so extraordinary were the social circumstances of
Renaissance Italy, that almost at every turn, on her seaboard, in her
cities, from her hill-tops, we are compelled to blend our admiration for
the loveliest and purest works of art amid the choicest scenes of nature
with memories of execrable crimes and lawless characters. Sometimes,
as at Perugia, the nexus is but local. At others, one single figure, like
that of Cellini, unites both points of view in a romance of unparalleled
dramatic vividness. Or, again, beneath the vaults of the Certosa, near
Pavia, a masterpiece of the serenest beauty carries our thoughts
perforce back to the hideous cruelties and snake-like frauds of its
despotic founder. This is the excuse for combining two such diverse
subjects in one study.
*****
BERGAMO AND BARTOLOMMEO COLLEONI
From the new town of commerce to the old town of history upon the
hill, the road is carried along a rampart lined, with horse-chestnut
trees--clumps of massy foliage, and snowy pyramids of bloom,
expanded in the rapture of a southern spring. Each pair of trees between
their stems and arch of intermingling leaves includes a space of plain,
checkered with cloud-shadows, melting blue and green in amethystine
haze. To right and left the last spurs of the Alps descend, jutting like
promontories, heaving like islands from the misty breadth below: and
here and there are towers, half-lost in airy azure; and cities dwarfed to
blots; and silvery lines where rivers flow; and distant, vapour-drowned,
dim crests of Apennines. The city walls above us wave with
snapdragons and iris among fig-trees sprouting from the riven stones.
There are terraces over-rioted with pergolas of vine, and houses
shooting forward into balconies and balustrades, from which a Romeo
might launch himself at daybreak, warned by the lark's song. A sudden
angle in the road is turned, and we pass from airspace and freedom into
the old town, beneath walls of dark brown masonry, where wild
valerians light their torches of red bloom in immemorial shade. Squalor
and splendour live here side by side. Grand Renaissance portals
grinning with Satyr masks are flanked by tawdry frescoes shamming
stonework, or by doorways where the withered bush hangs out a
promise of bad wine. The Cappella Colleoni is our destination, that
masterpiece of the sculptor-architect's craft, with its variegated
marbles,--rosy and white and creamy yellow and jet-black,--in patterns,
basreliefs, pilasters, statuettes, encrusted on the fanciful domed shrine.
Upon the façade are mingled, in the true Renaissance spirit of genial
acceptance, motives Christian and Pagan with supreme impartiality.
Medallions of emperors and gods alternate with virtues, angels and
cupids in a maze of loveliest arabesque; and round the base of the
building are told two stories--the one of Adam from his creation to his
fall, the other of Hercules and his labours. Italian craftsmen of the
quattrocento were not averse to setting thus together, in one framework,
the myths of our first parents and Alemena's son: partly perhaps
because both subjects gave scope to the free treatment of the nude; but
partly also, we may venture to surmise, because the heroism of Hellas
counterbalanced the sin of Eden. Here then we see how Adam and Eve
were made and tempted and expelled from Paradise and set to labour,
how Cain killed Abel, and Lamech slew a man to his hurt, and Isaac
was offered on the mountain. The tale of human sin and the promise of
redemption are epitomised in twelve of the sixteen basreliefs. The
remaining four show Hercules wrestling with Antæus, taming the
Nemean lion, extirpating the Hydra, and bending to his will the bull of
Crete. Labour, appointed for a punishment to Adam, becomes a title to
immortality for the hero. The dignity of man is reconquered by prowess
for the Greek, as it is repurchased for the Christian by vicarious
suffering. Many may think this interpretation of Amadeo's basreliefs
far-fetched; yet, such as it is, it agrees with the spirit of Humanism,
bent ever on harmonising the two great traditions of the past. Of the
workmanship little need be said, except that it is wholly Lombard,
distinguished from the similar work of Della Quercia at Bologna and
Siena by a more imperfect feeling for composition, and a lack of
monumental gravity, yet graceful, rich in motives, and instinct with a
certain wayward improvvisatore charm.
This Chapel was built by the great Condottiere Bartolommeo Colleoni,
to be the monument of his puissance even in the grave. It had been the
Sacristy of S. Maria Maggiore, which, when the Consiglio della
Misericordia refused it to him for his half-proud, half-pious purpose, he
took and held by force. The structure, of costliest materials, reared by
Gian Antonio Amadeo, cost him 50,000 golden florins. An equestrian
statue of gilt wood, voted to him by the town of Bergamo, surmounts
his monument inside the Chapel. This was the work of two German
masters, called 'Sisto figlio di Enrico Syri da Norimberga' and
'Leonardo Tedesco.' The tomb itself is of marble, executed for the most
part in a Lombard style resembling Amadeo's, but scarcely worthy of
his genius. The whole effect is disappointing. Five figures representing
Mars, Hercules, and three sons-in-law of Colleoni, who surround the
sarcophagus of the buried general, are indeed almost grotesque. The
angularity and crumpled draperies of the Milanese manner, when so
exaggerated, produce an impression of caricature. Yet many
subordinate details--a row of putti in a cinquecento frieze, for
instance--and much of the low relief work--especially the Crucifixion
with its characteristic episodes of the fainting Maries and the soldiers
casting dice--are lovely in their unaffected Lombardism.
There is another portrait of Colleoni in a round above the great door,
executed with spirit, though in a bravura style that curiously anticipates
the decline of Italian sculpture. Gaunt, hollow-eyed, with prominent
cheek bones and strong jaws, this animated, half-length statue of the
hero bears the stamp of a good likeness; but when or by whom it was
made, I do not know.
Far more noteworthy than Colleoni's own monument is that of his
daughter Medea. She died young in 1470, and her father caused her
tomb, carved of Carrara marble, to be placed in the Dominican Church
of Basella, which he had previously founded. It was not until 1842 that
this most precious masterpiece of Antonio Amadeo's skill was
transferred to Bergamo. Hic jacet Medea virgo. Her hands are clasped
across her breast. A robe of rich brocade, gathered to the waist and
girdled, lies in simple folds upon the bier. Her throat, exceedingly long
and slender, is circled with a string of pearls. Her face is not beautiful,
for the features, especially the nose, are large and prominent; but it is
pure and expressive of vivid individuality. The hair curls in crisp short
clusters, and the ear, fine and shaped almost like a Faun's, reveals the
scrupulous fidelity of the sculptor. Italian art has, in truth, nothing more
exquisite than this still sleeping figure of the girl, who, when she lived,
must certainly have been so rare of type and lovable in personality. If
Busti's Lancinus Curtius be the portrait of a humanist, careworn with
study, burdened by the laurel leaves that were so dry and dusty--if
Gaston de Foix in the Brera, smiling at death and beautiful in the
cropped bloom of youth, idealise the hero of romance--if
Michelangelo's Penseroso translate in marble the dark broodings of a
despot's soul--if Della Porta's Julia Farnese be the Roman courtesan
magnificently throned in nonchalance at a Pope's footstool--if
Verocchio's Colleoni on his horse at Venice impersonate the pomp and
circumstance of scientific war--surely this Medea exhales the
flower-like graces, the sweet sanctities of human life, that even in that
turbid age were found among high-bred Italian ladies. Such power have
mighty sculptors, even in our modern world, to make the mute stone
speak in poems and clasp the soul's life of a century in some five or six
transcendent forms.
The Colleoni, or Coglioni, family were of considerable antiquity and
well-authenticated nobility in the town of Bergamo. Two lions' heads
conjoined formed one of their canting ensigns; another was borrowed
from the vulgar meaning of their name. Many members of the house
held important office during the three centuries preceding the birth of
the famous general, Bartolommeo. He was born in the year 1400 at
Solza, in the Bergamasque Contado. His father Paolo, or Pùho as he
was commonly called, was poor and exiled from the city, together with
the rest of the Guelf nobles, by the Visconti. Being a man of daring
spirit, and little inclined to languish in a foreign state as the dependent
on some patron, Pùho formed the bold design of seizing the Castle of
Trezzo. This he achieved in 1405 by fraud, and afterwards held it as his
own by force. Partly with the view of establishing himself more firmly
in his acquired lordship, and partly out of family affection, Pùho
associated four of his first-cousins in the government of Trezzo. They
repaid his kindness with an act of treason and cruelty, only too
characteristic of those times in Italy. One day while he was playing at
draughts in a room of the Castle, they assaulted him and killed him,
seized his wife and the boy Bartolommeo, and flung them into prison.
The murdered Pùho had another son, Antonio, who escaped and took
refuge with Giorgio Benzone, the tyrant of Crema. After a short time
the Colleoni brothers found means to assassinate him also; therefore
Bartolommeo alone, a child of whom no heed was taken, remained to
be his father's avenger. He and his mother lived together in great
indigence at Solza, until the lad felt strong enough to enter the service
of one of the numerous petty Lombard princes, and to make himself if
possible a captain of adventure. His name alone was a sufficient
introduction, and the Duchy of Milan, dismembered upon the death of
Gian Maria Visconti, was in such a state that all the minor despots were
increasing their forces and preparing to defend by arms the fragments
they had seized from the Visconti heritage. Bartolommeo therefore had
no difficulty in recommending himself to Filippo d'Arcello, sometime
general in the pay of the Milanese, but now the new lord of Piacenza.
With this master he remained as page for two or three years, learning
the use of arms, riding, and training himself in the physical exercises
which were indispensable to a young Italian soldier. Meanwhile Filippo
Maria Visconti reacquired his hereditary dominions; and at the age of
twenty, Bartolommeo found it prudent to seek a patron stronger than
d'Arcello. The two great Condottieri, Sforza Attendolo and Braccio,
divided the military glories of Italy at this period; and any youth who
sought to rise in his profession, had to enrol himself under the banners
of the one or the other. Bartolommeo chose Braccio for his master, and
was enrolled among his men as a simple trooper, or ragazzo, with no
better prospects than he could make for himself by the help of his
talents and his borrowed horse and armour. Braccio at this time was in
Apulia, prosecuting the war of the Neapolitan Succession disputed
between Alfonso of Aragon and Louis of Anjou under the weak
sovereignty of Queen Joan. On which side of a quarrel a Condottiere
fought mattered but little: so great was the confusion of Italian politics,
and so complete was the egotism of these fraudful, violent, and
treacherous party leaders. Yet it may be mentioned that Braccio had
espoused Alfonso's cause. Bartolommeo Colleoni early distinguished
himself among the ranks of the Bracceschi. But he soon perceived that
he could better his position by deserting to another camp. Accordingly
he offered his services to Jacopo Caldora, one of Joan's generals, and
received from him a commission of twenty men-at-arms. It may here be
parenthetically said that the rank and pay of an Italian captain varied
with the number of the men he brought into the field. His title
'Condottiere' was derived from the circumstance that he was said to
have received a Condotta di venti cavalli, and so forth. Each cavallo
was equal to one mounted man-at-arms and two attendants, who were
also called ragazzi. It was his business to provide the stipulated number
of men, to keep them in good discipline, and to satisfy their just
demands. Therefore an Italian army at this epoch consisted of
numerous small armies varying in size, each held together by personal
engagements to a captain, and all dependent on the will of a
general-in-chief, who had made a bargain with some prince or republic
for supplying a fixed contingent of fighting-men. The Condottiere was
in other words a contractor or impresario, undertaking to do a certain
piece of work for a certain price, and to furnish the requisite forces for
the business in good working order. It will be readily seen upon this
system how important were the personal qualities of the captain, and
what great advantages those Condottieri had, who, like the petty
princes of Romagna and the March, the Montefeltri, Ordelaffi,
Malatesti, Manfredi, Orsini, and Vitelli, could rely upon a race of hardy
vassals for their recruits.
It is not necessary to follow Colleoni's fortunes in the Regno, at Aquila,
Ancona, and Bologna. He continued in the service of Caldora, who was
now General of the Church, and had his Condotta gradually increased.
Meanwhile his cousins, the murderers of his father, began to dread his
rising power, and determined, if possible, to ruin him. He was not a
man to be easily assassinated; so they sent a hired ruffian to Caldora's
camp to say that Bartolommeo had taken his name by fraud, and that he
was himself the real son of Pùho Colleoni. Bartolommeo defied the liar
to a duel; and this would have taken place before the army, had not two
witnesses appeared, who knew the fathers of both Colleoni and the
bravo, and who gave such evidence that the captains of the army were
enabled to ascertain the truth. The impostor was stripped and drummed
out of the camp.
At the conclusion of a peace between the Pope and the Bolognese,
Bartolommeo found himself without occupation. He now offered
himself to the Venetians, and began to fight again under the great
Carmagnola against Filippo Visconti. His engagement allowed him
forty men, which, after the judicial murder of Carmagnola at Venice in
1432, were increased to eighty. Erasmo da Narni, better known as
Gattamelata, was now his general-in-chief--a man who had risen from
the lowest fortunes to one of the most splendid military positions in
Italy. Colleoni spent the next years of his life, until 1443, in Lombardy,
manoeuvring against Il Piccinino, and gradually rising in the Venetian
service, until his Condotta reached the number of 800 men. Upon
Gattamelata's death at Padua in 1440, Colleoni became the most
important of the generals who had fought with Caldora in the March.
The lordships of Romano in the Bergamasque and of Covo and
Antegnate in the Cremonese had been assigned to him; and he was in a
position to make independent engagements with princes. What
distinguished him as a general, was a combination of caution with
audacity. He united the brilliant system of his master Braccio with the
more prudent tactics of the Sforzeschi; and thus, though he often
surprised his foes by daring stratagems and vigorous assaults, he rarely
met with any serious check. He was a captain who could be relied upon
for boldly seizing an advantage, no less than for using a success with
discretion. Moreover he had acquired an almost unique reputation for
honesty in dealing with his masters, and for justice combined with
humane indulgence to his men. His company was popular, and he could
always bring capital troops into the field.
In the year 1443 Colleoni quitted the Venetian service on account of a
quarrel with Gherardo Dandolo, the Provoditore of the Republic. He
now took a commission from Filippo Maria Visconti, who received
him at Milan with great honour, bestowed on him the Castello Adorno
at Pavia, and sent him into the March of Ancona upon a military
expedition. Of all Italian tyrants this Visconti was the most difficult to
serve. Constitutionally timid, surrounded with a crowd of spies and
base informers, shrinking from the sight of men in the recesses of his
palace, and controlling the complicated affairs of his Duchy by means
of correspondents and intelligencers, this last scion of the Milanese
despots lived like a spider in an inscrutable network of suspicion and
intrigue. His policy was one of endless plot and counterplot. He trusted
no man; his servants were paid to act as spies on one another; his
bodyguard consisted of mutually hostile mercenaries; his captains in
the field were watched and thwarted by commissioners appointed to
check them at the point of successful ambition or magnificent victory.
The historian has a hard task when he tries to fathom the Visconti's
schemes, or to understand his motives. Half the Duke's time seems to
have been spent in unravelling the webs that he had woven, in undoing
his own work, and weakening the hands of his chosen ministers.
Conscious that his power was artificial, that the least breath might blow
him back into the nothingness from which he had arisen on the wrecks
of his father's tyranny, he dreaded the personal eminence of his
generals above all things. His chief object was to establish a system of
checks, by means of which no one whom he employed should at any
moment be great enough to threaten him. The most formidable of these
military adventurers, Francesco Sforza, had been secured by marriage
with Bianca Maria Visconti, his master's only daughter, in 1441; but
the Duke did not even trust his son-in-law. The last six years of his life
were spent in scheming to deprive Sforza of his lordships; and the war
in the March, on which he employed Colleoni, had the object of ruining
the principality acquired by this daring captain from Pope Eugenius IV.
in 1443.
Colleoni was by no means deficient in those foxlike qualities which
were necessary to save the lion from the toils spread for him by Italian
intriguers. He had already shown that he knew how to push his own
interests, by changing sides and taking service with the highest bidder,
as occasion prompted. Nor, though his character for probity and loyalty
stood exceptionally high among the men of his profession, was he the
slave to any questionable claims of honour or of duty. In that age of
confused politics and extinguished patriotism, there was not indeed
much scope for scrupulous honesty. But Filippo Maria Visconti proved
more than a match for him in craft. While Colleoni was engaged in
pacifying the revolted population of Bologna, the Duke yielded to the
suggestion of his parasites at Milan, who whispered that the general
was becoming dangerously powerful. He recalled him, and threw him
without trial into the dungeons of the Forni at Monza. Here Colleoni
remained a prisoner more than a year, until the Duke's death in 1447,
when he made his escape, and profited by the disturbance of the Duchy
to reacquire his lordships in the Bergamasque territory. The true motive
for his imprisonment remains still buried in obscure conjecture.
Probably it was not even known to the Visconti, who acted on this, as
on so many other occasions, by a mere spasm of suspicious jealousy,
for which he could have given no account.
From the year 1447 to the year 1455, it is difficult to follow Colleoni's
movements, or to trace his policy. First, we find him employed by the
Milanese Republic, during its brief space of independence; then he is
engaged by the Venetians, with a commission for 1500 horse; next, he
is in the service of Francesco Sforza; once more in that of the Venetians,
and yet again in that of the Duke of Milan. His biographer relates with
pride that, during this period, he was three times successful against
French troops in Piedmont and Lombardy. It appears that he made short
engagements, and changed his paymasters according to convenience.
But all this time he rose in personal importance, acquired fresh
lordships in the Bergamasque, and accumulated wealth. He reached the
highest point of his prosperity in 1455, when the Republic of S. Mark
elected him General-in-Chief of their armies, with the fullest powers,
and with a stipend of 100,000 florins. For nearly twenty-one years,
until the day of his death, in 1475, Colleoni held this honourable and
lucrative office. In his will he charged the Signory of Venice that they
should never again commit into the hands of a single captain such
unlimited control over their military resources. It was indeed no slight
tribute to Colleoni's reputation for integrity, that the jealous Republic,
which had signified its sense of Carmagnola's untrustworthiness by
capital punishment, should have left him so long in the undisturbed
disposal of their army. The Standard and the Bâton of S. Mark were
conveyed to Colleoni by two ambassadors, and presented to him at
Brescia on June 24, 1455. Three years later he made a triumphal entry
into Venice, and received the same ensigns of military authority from
the hands of the new Doge, Pasquale Malipiero. On this occasion his
staff consisted of some two hundred officers, splendidly armed, and
followed by a train of serving-men. Noblemen from Bergamo, Brescia,
and other cities of the Venetian territory, swelled the cortege. When
they embarked on the lagoons, they found the water covered with boats
and gondolas, bearing the population of Venice in gala attire, to greet
the illustrious guest with instruments of music. Three great galleys of
the Republic, called Bucentaurs, issued from the crowd of smaller craft.
On the first was the Doge in his state robes, attended by the
government in office, or the Signoria of S. Mark. On the second were
members of the Senate and minor magistrates. The third carried the
ambassadors of foreign powers. Colleoni was received into the first
state-galley, and placed by the side of the Doge. The oarsmen soon
cleared the space between the land and Venice, passed the small canals,
and swept majestically up the Canalozzo among the plaudits of the
crowds assembled on both sides to cheer their General. Thus they
reached the piazzetta, where Colleoni alighted between the two great
pillars, and, conducted by the Doge in person, walked to the Church of
S. Mark. Here, after Mass had been said, and a sermon had been
preached, kneeling before the high altar he received the truncheon from
the Doge's hands. The words of his commission ran as follows:-'By authority and decree of this most excellent City of Venice, of us the
Prince, and of the Senate, you are to be Commander and Captain
General of all our forces and armaments on terra firma. Take from our
hands this truncheon, with good augury and fortune, as sign and
warrant of your power. Be it your care and effort, with dignity and
splendour to maintain and to defend the Majesty, the Loyalty, and the
Principles of this Empire. Neither provoking, not yet provoked, unless
at our command, shall you break into open warfare with our enemies.
Free jurisdiction and lordship over each one of our soldiers, except in
cases of treason, we hereby commit to you.'
After the ceremony of his reception, Colleoni was conducted with no
less pomp to his lodgings, and the next ten days were spent in
festivities of all sorts.
The commandership-in-chief of the Venetian forces was perhaps the
highest military post in Italy. It placed Colleoni on the pinnacle of his
profession, and made his camp the favourite school of young soldiers.
Among his pupils or lieutenants we read of Ercole d'Este, the future
Duke of Ferrara; Alessandro Sforza, lord of Pesaro; Boniface, Marquis
of Montferrat; Cicco and Pino Ordelaffi, princes of Forli; Astorre
Manfredi, the lord of Faenza; three Counts of Mirandola; two princes
of Carpi; Deifobo, the Count of Anguillara; Giovanni Antonio Caldora,
lord of Jesi in the March; and many others of less name. Honours came
thick upon him. When one of the many ineffectual leagues against the
infidel was formed in 1468, during the pontificate of Paul II., he was
named Captain-General for the Crusade. Pius II. designed him for the
leader of the expedition he had planned against the impious and savage
despot, Sigismondo Malatesta. King René of Anjou, by special patent,
authorised him to bear his name and arms, and made him a member of
his family. The Duke of Burgundy, by a similar heraldic fiction,
conferred upon him his name and armorial bearings. This will explain
why Colleoni is often styled 'di Andegavia e Borgogna.' In the case of
René, the honour was but a barren show. But the patent of Charles the
Bold had more significance. In 1473 he entertained the project of
employing the great Italian General against his Swiss foes; nor does it
seem reasonable to reject a statement made by Colleoni's biographer, to
the effect that a secret compact had been drawn up between him and the
Duke of Burgundy, for the conquest and partition of the Duchy of
Milan. The Venetians, in whose service Colleoni still remained, when
they became aware of this project, met it with peaceful but irresistible
opposition.
Colleoni had been engaged continually since his earliest boyhood in the
trade of war. It was not therefore possible that he should have gained a
great degree of literary culture. Yet the fashion of the times made it
necessary that a man in his position should seek the society of scholars.
Accordingly his court and camp were crowded with students, in whose
wordy disputations he is said to have delighted. It will be remembered
that his contemporaries, Alfonso the Magnanimous, Francesco Sforza,
Federigo of Urbino, and Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, piqued
themselves at least as much upon their patronage of letters, as upon
their prowess in the field.
Colleoni's court, like that of Urbino, was a model of good manners. As
became a soldier, he was temperate in food and moderate in slumber. It
was recorded of him that he had never sat more than one hour at meat
in his own house, and that he never overslept the sunrise. After dinner
he would converse with his friends, using commonly his native dialect
of Bergamo, and entertaining the company now with stories of
adventure, and now with pithy sayings. In another essential point he
resembled his illustrious contemporary, the Duke of Urbino; for he was
sincerely pious in an age which, however it preserved the decencies of
ceremonial religion, was profoundly corrupt at heart. His principal
lordships in the Bergamasque territory owed to his munificence their
fairest churches and charitable institutions. At Martinengo, for example,
he rebuilt and re-endowed two monasteries, the one dedicated to S.
Chiara, the other to S. Francis. In Bergamo itself he founded an
establishment named' La Pieta,' for the good purpose of dowering and
marrying poor girls. This house he endowed with a yearly income of
3000 ducats. The Sulphur baths of Trescorio, at some distance from the
city, were improved and opened to poor patients by a hospital which he
provided. At Rumano he raised a church to S. Peter, and erected
buildings of public utility, which on his death he bequeathed to the
society of the Misericordia in that town. All the places of his
jurisdiction owed to him such benefits as good water, new walls, and
irrigation works. In addition to these munificent foundations must be
mentioned the Basella, or Monastery of Dominican friars, which he
established not far from Bergamo, upon the river Serio, in memory of
his beloved daughter Medea. Last, not least, was the Chapel of S. John
the Baptist, attached to the Church of S. Maria Maggiore, which he
endowed with fitting maintenance for two priests and deacons.
The one defect acknowledged by his biographer was his partiality for
women. Early in life he married Tisbe, of the noble house of the
Brescian Martinenghi, who bore him one daughter, Caterina, wedded to
Gasparre Martinengo. Two illegitimate daughters, Ursina and Isotta,
were recognised and treated by him as legitimate. The first he gave in
marriage to Gherardo Martinengo, and the second to Jacopo of the
same family. Two other natural children, Doratina and Ricardona, were
mentioned in his will: he left them four thousand ducats a piece for
dowry. Medea, the child of his old age (for she was born to him when
he was sixty), died before her father, and was buried, as we have seen,
in the Chapel of Basella.
Throughout his life he was distinguished for great physical strength and
agility. When he first joined the troop of Braccio, he could race, with
his corselet on, against the swiftest runner of the army; and when he
was stripped, few horses could beat him in speed. Far on into old age
he was in the habit of taking long walks every morning for the sake of
exercise, and delighted in feats of arms and jousting matches. 'He was
tall, straight, and full of flesh, well proportioned, and excellently made
in all his limbs. His complexion inclined somewhat to brown, but was
coloured with sanguine and lively carnation. His eyes were black; in
look and sharpness of light, they were vivid, piercing, and terrible. The
outlines of his nose and all his countenance expressed a certain manly
nobleness, combined with goodness and prudence.' Such is the portrait
drawn of Colleoni by his biographer; and it well accords with the
famous bronze statue of the general at Venice.
Colleoni lived with a magnificence that suited his rank. His favourite
place of abode was Malpaga, a castle built by him at the distance of
about an hour's drive from Bergamo. The place is worth a visit, though
its courts and gates and galleries have now been turned into a monster
farm, and the southern rooms, where Colleoni entertained his guests,
are given over to the silkworms. Half a dozen families, employed upon
a vast estate of the Martinengo family, occupy the still substantial
house and stables. The moat is planted with mulberry-trees; the upper
rooms are used as granaries for golden maize; cows, pigs, and horses
litter in the spacious yard. Yet the walls of the inner court and of the
ancient state rooms are brilliant with frescoes, executed by some good
Venetian hand, which represent the chief events of Colleoni's life--his
battles, his reception by the Signory of Venice, his tournaments and
hawking parties, and the great series of entertainments with which he
welcomed Christiern of Denmark. This king had made his pilgrimage
to Rome and was returning westward, when the fame of Colleoni and
his princely state at Malpaga induced him to turn aside and spend some
days as the general's guest. In order to do him honour, Colleoni left his
castle at the king's disposal and established himself with all his staff
and servants in a camp at some distance from Malpaga. The camp was
duly furnished with tents and trenches, stockades, artillery, and all the
other furniture of war. On the king's approach, Colleoni issued with
trumpets blowing and banners flying to greet his guest, gratifying him
thus with a spectacle of the pomp and circumstance of war as carried on
in Italy. The visit was further enlivened by sham fights, feats of arms,
and trials of strength. When it ended, Colleoni presented the king with
one of his own suits of armour, and gave to each of his servants a
complete livery of red and white, his colours. Among the frescoes at
Malpaga none are more interesting, and none, thanks to the silkworms
rather than to any other cause, are fortunately in a better state of
preservation, than those which represent this episode in the history of
the Castle.
Colleoni died in the year 1475, at the age of seventy-five. Since he left
no male representative, he constituted the Republic of S. Mark his
heir-in-chief, after properly providing for his daughters and his
numerous foundations. The Venetians received under this testament a
sum of 100,000 ducats, together with all arrears of pay due to him, and
10,000 ducats owed him by the Duke of Ferrara. It set forth the
testator's intention that this money should be employed in defence of
the Christian faith against the Turk. One condition was attached to the
bequest. The legatees were to erect a statue to Colleoni on the Piazza of
S. Mark. This, however, involved some difficulty; for the proud
Republic had never accorded a similar honour, nor did they choose to
encumber their splendid square with a monument. They evaded the
condition by assigning the Campo in front of the Scuola di S. Marco,
where also stands the Church of S. Zanipolo, to the purpose. Here
accordingly the finest bronze equestrian statue in Italy, if we except the
Marcus Aurelius of the Capitol, was reared upon its marble pedestal by
Andrea Verocchio and Alessandro Leopardi.
Colleoni's liberal expenditure of wealth found its reward in the
immortality conferred by art. While the names of Braccio, his master in
the art of war, and of Piccinino, his great adversary, are familiar to few
but professed students, no one who has visited either Bergamo or
Venice can fail to have learned something about the founder of the
Chapel of S. John and the original of Leopardi's bronze. The annals of
sculpture assign to Verocchio, of Florence, the principal share in this
statue: but Verocchio died before it was cast; and even granting that he
designed the model, its execution must be attributed to his collaborator,
the Venetian Leopardi. For my own part, I am loth to admit that the
chief credit of this masterpiece belongs to a man whose undisputed
work at Florence shows but little of its living spirit and splendour of
suggested motion. That the Tuscan science of Verocchio secured
conscientious modelling for man and horse may be assumed; but I am
fain to believe that the concentrated fire which animates them both is
due in no small measure to the handling of his northern
fellow-craftsman.
While immersed in the dreary records of crimes, treasons, cruelties, and
base ambitions, which constitute the bulk of fifteenth-century Italian
history, it is refreshing to meet with a character so frank and manly, so
simply pious and comparatively free from stain, as Colleoni. The only
general of his day who can bear comparison with him for purity of
public life and decency in conduct, was Federigo di Montefeltro. Even
here, the comparison redounds to Colleoni's credit; for he, unlike the
Duke of Urbino, rose to eminence by his own exertion in a profession
fraught with peril to men of ambition and energy. Federigo started with
a principality sufficient to satisfy his just desires for power. Nothing
but his own sense of right and prudence restrained Colleoni upon the
path which brought Francesco Sforza to a duchy by dishonourable
dealings, and Carmagnola to the scaffold by questionable practice
against his masters.
*****
CREMA AND THE CRUCIFIX
Few people visit Crema. It is a little country town of Lombardy,
between Cremona and Treviglio, with no historic memories but very
misty ones belonging to the days of the Visconti dynasty. On every side
around the city walls stretch smiling vineyards and rich meadows,
where the elms are married to the mulberry-trees by long festoons of
foliage hiding purple grapes, where the sunflowers droop their heavy
golden heads among tall stems of millet and gigantic maize, and here
and there a rice-crop ripens in the marshy loam. In vintage time the
carts, drawn by their white oxen, come creaking townward in the
evening, laden with blue bunches. Down the long straight roads,
between rows of poplars, they creep on; and on the shafts beneath the
pyramid of fruit lie contadini stained with lees of wine. Far off across
that 'waveless sea' of Lombardy, which has been the battlefield of
countless generations, rise the dim grey Alps, or else pearled domes of
thunder-clouds in gleaming masses over some tall solitary tower. Such
backgrounds, full of peace, suggestive of almost infinite distance, and
dignified with colours of incomparable depth and breadth, the Venetian
painters loved. No landscape in Europe is more wonderful than
this--thrice wonderful in the vastness of its arching heavens, in the
stillness of its level plain, and in the bulwark of huge crested mountains,
reared afar like bastions against the northern sky. The little town is all
alive in this September weather. At every corner of the street, under
rustling abeles and thick-foliaged planes, at the doors of palaces and in
the yards of inns, men, naked from the thighs downward, are treading
the red must into vats and tuns; while their mild-eyed oxen lie beneath
them in the road, peaceably chewing the cud between one journey to
the vineyard and another. It must not be imagined that the scene of
Alma Tadema's 'Roman Vintage,' or what we fondly picture to our
fancy of the Athenian Lenaea, is repeated in the streets of Crema. This
modern treading of the wine-press is a very prosaic affair. The town
reeks with a sour smell of old casks and crushed grape-skins, and the
men and women at work bear no resemblance whatever to Bacchus and
his crew. Yet even as it is, the Lombard vintage, beneath floods of
sunlight and a pure blue sky, is beautiful; and he who would fain make
acquaintance with Crema, should time his entry into the old town, if
possible, on some still golden afternoon of autumn. It is then, if ever,
that he will learn to love the glowing brickwork of its churches and the
quaint terra-cotta traceries that form its chief artistic charm.
How the unique brick architecture of the Lombard cities took its
origin--whether from the precepts of Byzantine aliens in the earliest
middle ages, or from the native instincts of a mixed race composed of
Gallic, Ligurian, Roman, and Teutonic elements, under the leadership
of Longobardic rulers--is a question for antiquarians to decide. There
can, however, be no doubt that the monuments of the Lombard style, as
they now exist, are no less genuinely local, no less characteristic of the
country they adorn, no less indigenous to the soil they sprang from,
than the Attic colonnades of Mnesicles and Ictinus. What the marble
quarries of Pentelicus were to the Athenian builders, the clay beneath
their feet was to those Lombard craftsmen. From it they fashioned
structures as enduring, towers as majestic, and cathedral aisles as
solemn, as were ever wrought from chiselled stone. There is a true
sympathy between those buildings and the Lombard landscape, which
by itself might suffice to prove the originality of their almost unknown
architects. The rich colour of the baked clay--finely modulated from a
purplish red, through russet, crimson, pink, and orange, to pale yellow
and dull grey--harmonises with the brilliant greenery of Lombard
vegetation and with the deep azure of the distant Alpine range. Reared
aloft above the flat expanse of plain, those square torroni, tapering into
octagons and crowned with slender cones, break the long sweeping
lines and infinite horizons with a contrast that affords relief, and yields
a resting-place to tired eyes; while, far away, seen haply from some
bridge above Ticino, or some high-built palace loggia, they gleam like
columns of pale rosy fire against the front of mustering storm-clouds
blue with rain. In that happy orchard of Italy, a pergola of vines in leaf,
a clump of green acacias, and a campanile soaring above its church roof,
brought into chance combination with the reaches of the plain and the
dim mountain range, make up a picture eloquent in its suggestive
beauty.
Those ancient builders wrought cunningly with their material. The
bricks are fashioned and fixed to last for all time. Exposed to the icy
winds of a Lombard winter, to the fierce fire of a Lombard summer,
and to the moist vapours of a Lombard autumn; neglected by
unheeding generations; with flowers clustering in their crannies, and
birds nesting in their eaves, and mason-bees filling the delicate network
of their traceries--they still present angles as sharp as when they were
but finished, and joints as nice as when the mortar dried in the first
months of their building. This immunity from age and injury they owe
partly to the imperishable nature of baked clay; partly to the care of the
artists who selected and mingled the right sorts of earth, burned them
with scrupulous attention, and fitted them together with a patience born
of loving service. Each member of the edifice was designed with a view
to its ultimate place. The proper curve was ascertained for cylindrical
columns and for rounded arches. Larger bricks were moulded for the
supporting walls, and lesser pieces were adapted to the airy vaults and
lanterns. In the brickfield and the kiln the whole church was planned
and wrought out in its details, before the hands that made a unity of all
these scattered elements were set to the work of raising it in air. When
they came to put the puzzle together, they laid each brick against its
neighbour, filling up the almost imperceptible interstices with liquid
cement composed of quicklime and fine sand in water. After five
centuries the seams between the layers of bricks that make the
bell-tower of S. Gottardo at Milan, yield no point of vantage to the
penknife or the chisel.
Nor was it in their welding of the bricks alone that these craftsmen
showed their science. They were wont to enrich the surface with marble,
sparingly but effectively employed--as in those slender detached
columns, which add such beauty to the octagon of S. Gottardo, or in the
string-courses of strange beasts and reptiles that adorn the church fronts
of Pavia. They called to their aid the mandorlato of Verona, supporting
their porch pillars on the backs of couchant lions, inserting polished
slabs on their façades, and building huge sarcophagi into their cloister
alleys. Between terra-cotta and this marble of Verona there exists a
deep and delicate affinity. It took the name of mandorlato, I suppose,
from a resemblance to almond blossoms. But it is far from having the
simple beauty of a single hue. Like all noble veined stones, it passes by
a series of modulations and gradations through a gamut of associated
rather than contrasted tints. Not the pink of the almond blossom only,
but the creamy whiteness of the almond kernel, and the dull yellow of
the almond nut may be found in it; and yet these colours are so blent
and blurred to all-pervading mellowness, that nowhere is there any
shock of contrast or violence of a preponderating tone. The veins which
run in labyrinths of crossing, curving, and contorted lines all over its
smooth surface add, no doubt, to this effect of unity. The polish, lastly,
which it takes, makes the mandorlato shine like a smile upon the sober
face of the brickwork: for, serviceable as terra-cotta is for nearly all
artistic purposes, it cannot reflect light or gain the illumination which
comes from surface brightness.
What the clay can do almost better than any crystalline material, may
be seen in the mouldings so characteristic of Lombard architecture.
Geometrical patterns of the rarest and most fanciful device; scrolls of
acanthus foliage, and traceries of tendrils; Cupids swinging in festoons
of vines; angels joining hands in dance, with fluttering skirts and windy
hair, and mouths that symbol singing; grave faces of old men and
beautiful profiles of maidens leaning from medallions; wide-winged
genii filling the spandrils of cloister arches, and cherubs clustered in the
rondure of rose-windows--ornaments like these, wrought from the
plastic clay, and adapted with true taste to the requirements of the
architecture, are familiar to every one who has studied the church front
of Crema, the cloisters of the Certosa, the courts of the Ospedale
Maggiore at Milan, or the public palace of Cremona.
If the mandorlato gives a smile to those majestic Lombard buildings,
the terra-cotta decorations add the element of life and movement. The
thought of the artist in its first freshness and vivacity is felt in them.
They have all the spontaneity of improvisation, the seductive melody of
unpremeditated music. Moulding the supple earth with 'hand obedient
to the brain,' the plasticatore has impressed his most fugitive dreams of
beauty on it without effort; and what it cost him but a few fatigueless
hours to fashion, the steady heat of the furnace has gifted with
imperishable life. Such work, no doubt, has the defects of its qualities.
As there are few difficulties to overcome, it suffers from a fatal
facility--nec pluteum coedit nec demorsos sapit ungues. It is therefore
apt to be unequal, touching at times the highest point of inspiration, as
in the angels of Guccio at Perugia, and sinking not unfrequently into
the commonplace of easygoing triviality, as in the common floral
traceries of Milanese windows. But it is never laboured, never pedantic,
never dulled by the painful effort to subdue an obstinate material to the
artist's will. If marble is required to develop the strength of the few
supreme sculptors, terra-cotta saves intact the fancies of a crowd of
lesser men.
When we reflect that all the force, solemnity, and beauty of the
Lombard buildings was evoked from clay, we learn from them this
lesson: that the thought of man needs neither precious material nor yet
stubborn substance for the production of enduring masterpieces. The
red earth was enough for God when He made man in His own image;
and mud dried in the sun suffices for the artist, who is next to God in
his creative faculty--since non merita nome di creatore se non Iddio ed
il poeta. After all, what is more everlasting than terra-cotta? The
hobnails of the boys who ran across the brickfields in the Roman town
of Silchester, may still be seen, mingled with the impress of the feet of
dogs and hoofs of goats, in the tiles discovered there. Such traces might
serve as a metaphor for the footfall of artistic genius, when the
form-giver has stamped his thought upon the moist clay, and fire has
made that imprint permanent.
Of all these Lombard edifices, none is more beautiful than the
Cathedral of Crema, with its delicately finished campanile, built of
choicely tinted yellow bricks, and ending in a lantern of the gracefullest,
most airily capricious fancy. This bell-tower does not display the
gigantic force of Cremona's famous torrazzo, shooting 396 feet into
blue ether from the city square; nor can it rival the octagon of S.
Gottardo for warmth of hue. Yet it has a character of elegance,
combined with boldness of invention, that justifies the citizens of
Crema in their pride. It is unique; and he who has not seen it does not
know the whole resources of the Lombard style. The façade of the
Cathedral displays that peculiar blending of Byzantine or Romanesque
round arches with Gothic details in the windows, and with the acute
angle of the central pitch, which forms the characteristic quality of the
late trecento Lombard manner. In its combination of purity and
richness it corresponds to the best age of decorated work in English
Gothic. What, however, strikes a Northern observer is the strange
detachment of this elaborate façade from the main structure of the
church. Like a frontispiece cut out of cardboard and pierced with
ornamental openings, it shoots far above the low roof of the nave; so
that at night the moon, rising above the southern aisle, shines through
its topmost window, and casts the shadow of its tracery upon the
pavement of the square. This is a constructive blemish to which the
Italians in no part of the peninsula were sensitive. They seem to have
regarded their church fronts as independent of the edifice, capable of
separate treatment, and worthy in themselves of being made the subject
of decorative skill.
In the so-called Santuario of Crema--a circular church dedicated to S.
Maria della Croce, outside the walls--the Lombard style has been
adapted to the manner of the Mid-Renaissance. This church was raised
in the last years of the fifteenth century by Gian Battista Battagli, an
architect of Lodi, who followed the pure rules of taste, bequeathed to
North Italian builders by Bramante. The beauty of the edifice is due
entirely to its tranquil dignity and harmony of parts, the lightness of its
circling loggia, and the just proportion maintained between the central
structure and the four projecting porticoes. The sharp angles of these
vestibules afford a contrast to the simplicity of the main building, while
their clustered cupolas assist the general effect of roundness aimed at
by the architect. Such a church as this proves how much may be
achieved by the happy distribution of architectural masses. It was the
triumph of the best Renaissance style to attain lucidity of treatment, and
to produce beauty by geometrical proportion. When Leo Battista
Alberti complained to his friend, Matteo di Bastia, that a slight
alteration of the curves in his design for S. Francesco at Rimini would
'spoil his music,' ciò che tu muti discorda tutta quella musica, this is
what he meant. The melody of lines and the harmony of parts made a
symphony to his eyes no less agreeable than a concert of tuned lutes
and voices to his ears; and to this concord he was so sensitive that any
deviation was a discord.
After visiting the churches of Crema and sauntering about the streets
awhile, there is nothing left to do but to take refuge in the old Albergo
del Pozzo. This is one of those queer Italian inns, which carry you away
at once into a scene of Goldoni. It is part of some palace, where nobles
housed their bravi in the sixteenth century, and which the lesser people
of to-day have turned into a dozen habitations. Its great stone staircase
leads to a saloon upon which the various bedchambers open; and round
its courtyard runs an open balcony, and from the court grows up a
fig-tree poking ripe fruit against a bedroom window. Oleanders in tubs
and red salvias in pots, and kitchen herbs in boxes, flourish on the
pavement, where the ostler comes to wash his carriages, and where the
barber shaves the poodle of the house. Visitors to the Albergo del
Pozzo are invariably asked if they have seen the Museo; and when they
answer in the negative, they are conducted with some ceremony to a
large room on the ground-floor of the inn, looking out upon the
courtyard and the fig-tree. It was here that I gained the acquaintance of
Signor Folcioni, and became possessor of an object that has made the
memory of Crema doubly interesting to me ever since.
When we entered the Museo, we found a little old man, gentle, grave,
and unobtrusive, varnishing the ugly portrait of some Signor of the
cinquecento. Round the walls hung pictures, of mediocre value, in
dingy frames; but all of them bore sounding titles. Titians, Lionardos,
Guido Renis, and Luinis, looked down and waited for a purchaser. In
truth this museum was a bric-à-brac shop of a sort that is common
enough in Italy, where treasures of old lace, glass, armour, furniture,
and tapestry, may still be met with. Signor Folcioni began by pointing
out the merits of his pictures; and after making due allowance for his
zeal as amateur and dealer, it was possible to join in some of his
eulogiums. A would-be Titian, for instance, bought in Verona from a
noble house in ruins, showed Venetian wealth of colour in its gemmy
greens and lucid crimsons shining from a background deep and
glowing. Then he led us to a walnut-wood bureau of late Renaissance
work, profusely carved with nymphs and Cupids, and armed men,
among festoons of fruits embossed in high relief. Deeply drilled
worm-holes set a seal of antiquity upon the blooming faces and
luxuriant garlandslike the touch of Time who 'delves the parallels in
beauty's brow.' On the shelves of an ebony cabinet close by he showed
us a row of cups cut out of rock-crystal and mounted in gilt silver, with
heaps of engraved gems, old snuff-boxes, coins, medals, sprays of coral,
and all the indescribable lumber that one age flings aside as worthless
for the next to pick up from the dust-heap and regard as precious.
Surely the genius of culture in our century might be compared to a
chiffonnier of Paris, who, when the night has fallen, goes into the
streets, bag on back and lantern in hand, to rake up the waifs and strays
a day of whirling life has left him.
The next curiosity was an ivory carving of S. Anthony preaching to the
fishes, so fine and small you held it on your palm, and used a lens to
look at it. Yet there stood the Santo gesticulating, and there were the
fishes in rows--the little fishes first, and then the middle-sized, and last
of all the great big fishes almost out at sea, with their heads above the
water and their mouths wide open, just as the Fioretti di San Francesco
describes them. After this came some original drawings of doubtful
interest, and then a case of fifty-two nielli. These were of
unquestionable value; for has not Cicognara engraved them on a page
of his classic monograph? The thin silver plates, over which once
passed the burin of Maso Finiguerra, cutting lines finer than hairs, and
setting here a shadow in dull acid-eaten grey, and there a high light of
exquisite polish, were far more delicate than any proofs impressed from
them. These frail masterpieces of Florentine art--the first beginnings of
line engraving--we held in our hands while Signor Folcioni read out
Cicognara's commentary in a slow impressive voice, breaking off now
and then to point at the originals before us.
The sun had set, and the room was almost dark, when he laid his book
down, and said: 'I have not much left to show--yet stay! Here are still
some little things of interest.' He then opened the door into his bedroom,
and took down from a nail above his bed a wooden Crucifix. Few
things have fascinated me more than this Crucifix--produced without
parade, half negligently, from the dregs of his collection by a dealer in
old curiosities at Crema. The cross was, or is--for it is lying on the table
now before me--twenty-one inches in length, made of strong wood,
covered with coarse yellow parchment, and shod at the four ends with
brass. The Christ is roughly hewn in reddish wood, coloured scarlet,
where the blood streams from the five wounds. Over the head an oval
medallion, nailed into the cross, serves as framework to a miniature of
the Madonna, softly smiling with a Correggiesque simper. The whole
Crucifix is not a work of art, but such as may be found in every convent.
Its date cannot be earlier than the beginning of the eighteenth century.
As I held it in my hand, I thought--perhaps this has been carried to the
bedside of the sick and dying; preachers have brandished it from the
pulpit over conscience-stricken congregations; monks have knelt before
it on the brick floor of their cells, and novices have kissed it in the vain
desire to drown their yearnings after the relinquished world; perhaps it
has attended criminals to the scaffold, and heard the secrets of
repentant murderers; but why should it be shown me as a thing of rarity?
These thoughts passed through my mind, while Signor Folcioni quietly
remarked: 'I bought this Cross from the Frati when their convent was
dissolved in Crema.' Then he bade me turn it round, and showed a little
steel knob fixed into the back between the arms. This was a spring. He
pressed it, and the upper and lower parts of the cross came asunder; and
holding the top like a handle, I drew out as from a scabbard a sharp
steel blade, concealed in the thickness of the wood, behind the very
body of the agonising Christ. What had been a crucifix became a
deadly poniard in my grasp, and the rust upon it in the twilight looked
like blood. 'I have often wondered,' said Signor Folcioni, 'that the Frati
cared to sell me this.'
There is no need to raise the question of the genuineness of this strange
relic, though I confess to having had my doubts about it, or to wonder
for what nefarious purposes the impious weapon was
designed--whether the blade was inserted by some rascal monk who
never told the tale, or whether it was used on secret service by the friars.
On its surface the infernal engine carries a dark certainty of treason,
sacrilege, and violence. Yet it would be wrong to incriminate the Order
of S. Francis by any suspicion, and idle to seek the actual history of this
mysterious weapon. A writer of fiction could indeed produce some dark
tale in the style of De Stendhal's 'Nouvelles,' and christen it 'The
Crucifix of Crema.' And how delighted would Webster have been if he
had chanced to hear of such a sword-sheath! He might have placed it in
the hands of Bosola for the keener torment of his Duchess. Flamineo
might have used it; or the disguised friars, who made the deathbed of
Bracciano hideous, might have plunged it in the Duke's heart after
mocking his eyes with the figure of the suffering Christ. To imagine
such an instrument of moral terror mingled with material violence, lay
within the scope of Webster's sinister and powerful genius. But unless
he had seen it with his eyes, what poet would have ventured to devise
the thing and display it even in the dumb show of a tragedy? Fact is
more wonderful than romance. No apocalypse of Antichrist matches
what is told of Roderigo Borgia; and the crucifix of Crema exceeds the
sombre fantasy of Webster.
Whatever may be the truth about this cross, it has at any rate the value
of a symbol or a metaphor. The idea which it materialises, the historical
events of which it is a sign, may well arrest attention. A sword
concealed in the crucifix--what emblem brings more forcibly to mind
than this that two-edged glaive of persecution which Dominic
unsheathed to mow down the populations of Provence and to make
Spain destitute of men? Looking upon the crucifix of Crema, we may
seem to see pestilence-stricken multitudes of Moors and Jews dying on
the coasts of Africa and Italy. The Spaniards enter Mexico; and this is
the cross they carry in their hands. They take possession of Peru; and
while the gentle people of the Incas come to kiss the bleeding brows of
Christ, they plunge this dagger in their sides. What, again, was the
temporal power of the Papacy but a sword embedded in a cross? Each
Papa Rè, when he ascended the Holy Chair, was forced to take the
crucifix of Crema and to bear it till his death. A long procession of
war-loving Pontiffs, levying armies and paying captains with the pence
of S. Peter, in order to keep by arms the lands they had acquired by
fraud, defiles before our eyes. First goes the terrible Sixtus IV., who
died of grief when news was brought him that the Italian princes had
made peace. He it was who sanctioned the conspiracy to murder the
Medici in church, at the moment of the elevation of the Host. The
brigands hired to do this work refused at the last moment. The sacrilege
appalled them. 'Then,' says the chronicler, 'was found a priest, who,
being used to churches, had no scruple.' The poignard this priest carried
was this crucifix of Crema. After Sixtus came the blood-stained Borgia;
and after him Julius II., whom the Romans in triumphal songs
proclaimed a second Mars, and who turned, as Michelangelo expressed
it, the chalices of Rome into swords and helms. Leo X., who
dismembered Italy for his brother and nephew; and Clement VII., who
broke the neck of Florence and delivered the Eternal City to the spoiler,
follow. Of the antinomy between the Vicariate of Christ and an earthly
kingdom, incarnated by these and other Holy Fathers, what symbol
could be found more fitting than a dagger with a crucifix for case and
covering?
It is not easy to think or write of these matters without rhetoric. When I
laid my head upon my pillow that night in the Albergo del Pozzo at
Crema, it was full of such thoughts; and when at last sleep came, it
brought with it a dream begotten doubtless by the perturbation of my
fancy. For I thought that a brown Franciscan, with hollow cheeks, and
eyes aflame beneath his heavy cowl, sat by my bedside, and, as he
raised the crucifix in his lean quivering hands, whispered a tale of
deadly passion and of dastardly revenge. His confession carried me
away to a convent garden of Palermo; and there was love in the story,
and hate that is stronger than love, and, for the ending of the whole
matter, remorse which dies not even in the grave. Each new possessor
of the crucifix of Crema, he told me, was forced to hear from him in
dreams his dreadful history. But, since it was a dream and nothing more,
why should I repeat it? I have wandered far enough already from the
vintage and the sunny churches of the little Lombard town.
*****
CHERUBINO AT THE SCALA THEATRE
I
It was a gala night. The opera-house of Milan was one blaze of light
and colour. Royalty in field-marshal's uniform and diamonds, attended
by decorated generals and radiant ladies of the court, occupied the great
box opposite the stage. The tiers from pit to gallery were filled with
brilliantly dressed women. From the third row, where we were
fortunately placed, the curves of that most beautiful of theatres
presented to my gaze a series of retreating and approaching lines,
composed of noble faces, waving feathers, sparkling jewels, sculptured
shoulders, uniforms, robes of costly stuffs and every conceivable bright
colour. Light poured from the huge lustre in the centre of the roof, ran
along the crimson velvet cushions of the boxes, and flashed upon the
gilded frame of the proscenium--satyrs and acanthus scrolls carved in
the manner of a century ago. Pit and orchestra scarcely contained the
crowd of men who stood in lively conversation, their backs turned to
the stage, their lorgnettes raised from time to time to sweep the boxes.
This surging sea of faces and sober costumes enhanced by contrast the
glitter, variety, and luminous tranquillity of the theatre above it.
No one took much thought of the coming spectacle, till the conductor's
rap was heard upon his desk, and the orchestra broke into the overture
to Mozart's Nozze. Before they were half through, it was clear that we
should not enjoy that evening the delight of perfect music added to the
enchantment of so brilliant a scene. The execution of the overture was
not exactly bad. But it lacked absolute precision, the complete
subordination of all details to the whole. In rendering German music
Italians often fail through want of discipline, or through imperfect
sympathy with a style they will not take the pains to master. Nor, when
the curtain lifted and the play began, was the vocalisation found in all
parts satisfactory. The Contessa had a meagre mezza voce. Susanna,
though she did not sing false, hovered on the verge of discords, owing
to the weakness of an organ which had to be strained in order to make
any effect on that enormous stage. On the other hand, the part of
Almaviva was played with dramatic fire, and Figaro showed a truly
Southern sense of comic fun. The scenes were splendidly mounted, and
something of a princely grandeur--the largeness of a noble train of
life--was added to the drama by the vast proportions of the theatre. It
was a performance which, in spite of drawbacks, yielded pleasure.
And yet it might have left me frigid but for the artist who played
Cherubino. This was no other than Pauline Lucca, in the prime of youth
and petulance. From her first appearance to the last note she sang, she
occupied the stage. The opera seemed to have been written for her. The
mediocrity of the troupe threw her commanding merits--the richness of
her voice, the purity of her intonation, her vivid conception of character,
her indescribable brusquerie of movement and emotion--into that relief
which a sapphire gains from a setting of pearls. I can see her now, after
the lapse of nearly twenty years, as she stood there singing in blue
doublet and white mantle, with the slouched Spanish hat and plume of
ostrich feathers, a tiny rapier at her side, and blue rosettes upon her
white silk shoes! The Nozze di Figaro was followed by a Ballo. This
had for its theme the favourite legend of a female devil sent from the
infernal regions to ruin a young man. Instead of performing the part
assigned her, Satanella falls in love with the hero, sacrifices herself,
and is claimed at last by the powers of goodness. Quia multum amavit,
her lost soul is saved. If the opera left much to be desired, the Ballo
was perfection. That vast stage of the Scala Theatre had almost
overwhelmed the actors of the play. Now, thrown open to its inmost
depths, crowded with glittering moving figures, it became a fairyland
of fantastic loveliness. Italians possess the art of interpreting a serious
dramatic action by pantomime. A Ballo with them is no mere affair of
dancing--fine dresses, evolutions performed by brigades of pink-legged
women with a fixed smile on their faces. It takes the rank of high
expressive art. And the motive of this Ballo was consistently worked
out in an intelligible sequence of well-ordered scenes. To moralise
upon its meaning would be out of place. It had a conflict of passions, a
rhythmical progression of emotions, a tragic climax in the triumph of
good over evil.
II
At the end of the performance there were five persons in our box--the
beautiful Miranda, and her husband, a celebrated English man of letters;
a German professor of biology; a young Milanese gentleman, whom we
called Edoardo; and myself. Edoardo and the professor had joined us
just before the ballet. I had occupied a seat behind Miranda and my
friend the critic from the commencement. We had indeed dined
together first at their hotel, the Rebecchino; and they now proposed that
we should all adjourn together there on foot for supper. From the Scala
Theatre to the Rebecchino is a walk of some three minutes.
When we were seated at the supper-table and had talked some while
upon indifferent topics, the enthusiasm roused in me by Pauline Lucca
burst out. I broke a moment's silence by exclaiming, 'What a
wonder-world music creates! I have lived this evening in a sphere of
intellectual enjoyment raised to rapture. I never lived so fast before!'
'Do you really think so?' said Miranda. She had just finished a
beccafico, and seemed disposed for conversation. 'Do you really think
so? For my part, music is in a wholly different region from experience,
thought, or feeling. What does it communicate to you?' And she
hummed to herself the motif of Cherubino's 'Non so più cosa son cosa
faccio.'--'What does it teach me?' I broke in upon the melody. 'Why,
to-night, when I heard the music, and saw her there, and felt the
movement of the play, it seemed to me that a new existence was
revealed. For the first time I understood what love might be in one most
richly gifted for emotion.' Miranda bent her eyes on the table-cloth and
played with her wineglass. 'I don't follow you at all. I enjoyed myself
to-night. The opera, indeed, might have been better rendered. The ballet,
I admit, was splendid. But when I remember the music--even the best
of it--even Pauline Lucca's part'--here she looked up, and shot me a
quick glance across the table--'I have mere music in my ears. Nothing
more. Mere music!' The professor of biology, who was gifted with, a
sense of music and had studied it scientifically, had now crunched his
last leaf of salad. Wiping his lips with his napkin, he joined our
tête-à-tête. 'Gracious madam, I agree with you. He who seeks from
music more than music gives, is on the quest--how shall I put it?--of the
Holy Grail.' 'And what,' I struck in, 'is this minimum or maximum that
music gives?' 'Dear young friend,' replied the professor, 'music gives
melodies, harmonies, the many beautiful forms to which sound shall be
fashioned. Just as in the case of shells and fossils, lovely in themselves,
interesting for their history and classification, so is it with music. You
must not seek an intellectual meaning. No; there is no Inhalt in music'
And he hummed contentedly the air of 'Voi che sapete.' While he was
humming, Miranda whispered to me across the table, 'Separate the
Lucca from the music.' 'But,' I answered rather hotly, for I was nettled
by Miranda's argument ad hominem, 'But it is not possible in an opera
to divide the music from the words, the scenery, the play, the actor.
Mozart, when he wrote the score to Da Ponte's libretto, was excited to
production by the situations. He did not conceive his melodies out of
connection with a certain cast of characters, a given ethical
environment.' 'I do not know, my dear young friend,' responded the
professor, 'whether you have read Mozart's Life and letters. It is clearly
shown in them how he composed airs at times and seasons when he had
no words to deal with. These he afterwards used as occasion served.
Whence I conclude that music was for him a free and lovely play of
tone. The words of our excellent Da Ponte were a scaffolding to
introduce his musical creations to the public. But without that
carpenter's work, the melodies of Cherubino are Selbst-ständig,
sufficient in themselves to vindicate their place in art. Do I interpret
your meaning, gracious lady?' This he said bending to Miranda. 'Yes,'
she replied. But she still played with her wineglass, and did not look as
though she were quite satisfied. I meanwhile continued: 'Of course I
have read Mozart's Life, and know how he went to work. But Mozart
was a man of feeling, of experience, of ardent passions. How can you
prove to me that the melodies he gave to Cherubino had not been
evolved from situations similar to those in which Cherubino finds
himself? How can you prove he did not feel a natural appropriateness
in the motifs he selected from his memory for Cherubino? How can you
be certain that the part itself did not stimulate his musical faculty to
fresh and still more appropriate creativeness? And if we must fall back
on documents, do you remember what he said himself about the
love-music in Die Entführung? I think he tells us that he meant it to
express his own feeling for the woman who had just become his wife.'
Miranda looked up as though she were almost half-persuaded. Yet she
hummed again 'Non so più,' then said to herself, 'Yes, it is wiser to
believe with the professor that these are sequences of sounds, and
nothing more.' Then she sighed. In the pause which followed, her
husband, the famous critic, filled his glass, stretched his legs out, and
began: 'You have embarked, I see, upon the ocean of æsthetics. For my
part, to-night I was thinking how much better fitted for the stage
Beaumarchais' play was than this musical mongrel--this operatic
adaptation. The wit, observe, is lost. And Cherubino--that sparkling
little enfant terrible--becomes a sentimental fellow--a something I don't
know what--between a girl and a boy--a medley of romance and
impudence--anyhow a being quite unlike the sharply outlined
playwright's page. I confess I am not a musician; the drama is my
business, and I judge things by their fitness for the stage. My wife
agrees with me to differ. She likes music, I like plays. To-night she was
better pleased than I was; for she got good music tolerably well
rendered, while I got nothing but a mangled comedy.'
We bore the critic's monologue with patience. But once again the spirit,
seeking after something which neither Miranda, nor her husband, nor
the professor could be got to recognise, moved within me. I cried out at
a venture, 'People who go to an opera must forget music pure and
simple, must forget the drama pure and simple. You must welcome a
third species of art, in which the play, the music, the singers with their
voices, the orchestra with its instruments--Pauline Lucca, if you like,
with her fascination' (and here I shot a side-glance at Miranda), 'are so
blent as to create a world beyond the scope of poetry or music or acting
taken by themselves. I give Mozart credit for having had insight into
this new world, for having brought it near to us. And I hold that every
fresh representation of his work is a fresh revelation of its possibilities.'
To this the critic answered, 'You now seem to me to be confounding the
limits of the several arts.' 'What!' I continued, 'is the drama but emotion
presented in its most external forms as action? And what is music but
emotion, in its most genuine essence, expressed by sound? Where then
can a more complete artistic harmony be found than in the opera?'
'The opera,' replied our host, 'is a hybrid. You will probably learn to
dislike artistic hybrids, if you have the taste and sense I give you credit
for. My own opinion has been already expressed. In the Nozze,
Beaumarchais' Mariage de Figaro is simply spoiled. My friend the
professor declares Mozart's music to be sufficient by itself, and the
libretto to be a sort of machinery for its display. Miranda, I think,
agrees with him. You plead eloquently for the hybrid. You have a right
to your own view. These things are matters, in the final resort, of
individual taste rather than of demonstrable principles. But I repeat that
you are very young.' The critic drained his Lambrusco, and smiled at
me.
'Yes, he is young,' added Miranda. 'He must learn to distinguish
between music, his own imagination, and a pretty woman. At present
he mixes them all up together. It is a sort of transcendental omelette.
But I think the pretty woman has more to do with it than metaphysics!'
All this while Edoardo had bestowed devout attention on his supper.
But it appeared that the drift of our discourse had not been lost by him.
'Well,' he said, 'you finely fibred people dissect and analyse. I am
content with the spettacolo. That pleases. What does a man want more?
The Nozze is a comedy of life and manners. The music is adorable.
To-night the women were not bad to look at--the Lucca was divine; the
scenes--ingenious. I thought but little. I came away delighted. You
could have a better play, Caro Signore!' (with a bow to our host). 'That
is granted. You might have better music, Cara Signora!' (with a bow to
Miranda). 'That too is granted. But when the play and the music come
together--how shall I say?--the music helps the play, and the play helps
the music; and we--well we, I suppose, must help both!'
Edoardo's little speech was so ingenuous, and, what is more, so true to
his Italian temperament, that it made us all laugh and leave the
argument just where we found it. The bottles of Lambrusco supplied us
each with one more glass; and while we were drinking them, Miranda,
woman-like, taking the last word, but contradicting herself, softly
hummed 'Non so più cosa son,' and 'Ah!' she said, 'I shall dream of love
to-night!'
We rose and said good-night. But when I had reached my bedroom in
the Hôtel de la Ville, I sat down, obstinate and unconvinced, and
penned this rhapsody, which I have lately found among papers of
nearly twenty years ago. I give it as it stands.
III
Mozart has written the two melodramas of love--the one a
melo-tragedy, the other a melo-comedy. But in really noble art,
Comedy and Tragedy have faces of equal serenity and beauty. In the
Vatican there are marble busts of the two Muses, differing chiefly in
their head-dresses: that of Tragedy is an elaborately built-up structure
of fillets and flowing hair, piled high above the forehead and
descending in long curls upon the shoulders; while Comedy wears a
similar adornment, with the addition of a wreath of vine-leaves and
grape-bunches. The expression of the sister goddesses is no less finely
discriminated. Over the mouth of Comedy plays a subtle smile, and her
eyes are relaxed in a half-merriment. A shadow rests upon the slightly
heavier brows of Tragedy, and her lips, though not compressed, are
graver. So delicately did the Greek artist indicate the division between
two branches of one dramatic art. And since all great art is classical,
Mozart's two melodramas, Don Giovanni and the Nozze di Figaro,
though the one is tragic and the other comic, are twin-sisters, similar in
form and feature.
The central figure of the melo-tragedy is Don Juan, the hero of
unlimited desire, pursuing the unattainable through tortuous
interminable labyrinths, eager in appetite yet never satisfied, 'for ever
following and for ever foiled.' He is the incarnation of lust that has
become a habit of the soul--rebellious, licentious, selfish, even cruel.
His nature, originally noble and brave, has assumed the qualities
peculiar to lust--rebellion, license, cruelty, defiant egotism. Yet, such as
he is, doomed to punishment and execration, Don Juan remains a fit
subject for poetry and music, because he is complete, because he is
impelled by some demonic influence, spurred on by yearnings after an
unsearchable delight. In his death, the spirit of chivalry survives,
metamorphosed, it is true, into the spirit of revolt, yet still tragic, such
as might animate the desperate sinner of a haughty breed.
The central figure of the melo-comedy is Cherubino, the genius of love,
no less insatiable, but undetermined to virtue or to vice. This is the
point of Cherubino, that the ethical capacities in him are still potential.
His passion still hovers on the borderland of good and bad. And this
undetermined passion is beautiful because of extreme freshness; of
infinite, immeasurable expansibility. Cherubino is the epitome of all
that belongs to the amorous temperament in a state of still ascendant
adolescence. He is about sixteen years of age--a boy yesterday, a man
to-morrow--to-day both and neither--something beyond boyhood, but
not yet limited by man's responsibility and man's absorbing passions.
He partakes of both ages in the primal awakening to self-consciousness.
Desire, which in Don Juan has become a fiend, hovers before him like a
fairy. His are the sixteen years, not of a Northern climate, but of Spain
or Italy, where manhood appears in a flash, and overtakes the child
with sudden sunrise of new faculties. Nondum amabam, sed amare
amabam, quaerebam quod amarem, amans amare--'I loved not yet, but
was in love with loving; I sought what I should love, being in love with
loving.' That sentence, penned by S. Augustine and consecrated by
Shelley, describes the mood of Cherubino. He loves at every moment
of his life, with every pulse of his being. His object is not a beloved
being, but love itself--the satisfaction of an irresistible desire, the
paradise of bliss which merely loving has become for him. What love
means he hardly knows. He only knows that he must love. And women
love him--half as a plaything to be trifled with, half as a young god to
be wounded by. This rising of the star of love as it ascends into the
heaven of youthful fancy, is revealed in the melodies Mozart has
written for him. How shall we describe their potency? Who shall
translate those curiously perfect words to which tone and rhythm have
been indissolubly wedded? E pur mi piace languir cosi.... E se non ho
chi m' oda, parlo d'amor con me.
But if this be so, it may be asked, Who shall be found worthy to act
Cherubino on the stage? You cannot have seen and heard Pauline
Lucca, or you would not ask this question.
Cherubino is by no means the most important person in the plot of the
Nozze. But he strikes the keynote of the opera. His love is the standard
by which we measure the sad, retrospective, stately love of the
Countess, who tries to win back an alienated husband. By Cherubino
we measure the libertine love of the Count, who is a kind of Don Juan
without cruelty, and the humorous love of Figaro and his sprightly
bride Susanna. Each of these characters typifies one of the many
species of love. But Cherubino anticipates and harmonises all. They are
conscious, experienced, world-worn, disillusioned, trivial. He is all
love, foreseen, foreshadowed in a dream of life to be; all love, diffused
through brain and heart and nerves like electricity; all love, merging the
moods of ecstasy, melancholy, triumph, regret, jealousy, joy,
expectation, in a hazy sheen, as of some Venetian sunrise. What will
Cherubino be after three years? A Romeo, a Lovelace, a Lothario, a
Juan? a disillusioned rake, a sentimentalist, an effete fop, a romantic
lover? He may become any one of these, for he contains the
possibilities of all. As yet, he is the dear glad angel of the May of love,
the nightingale of orient emotion. This moment in the unfolding of
character Mozart has arrested and eternalised for us in Cherubino's
melodies; for it is the privilege of art to render things most fugitive and
evanescent fixed imperishably in immortal form.
IV
This is indeed a rhapsodical production. Miranda was probably right.
Had it not been for Pauline Lucca, I might not have philosophised the
Nozze thus. Yet, in the main, I believe that my instinct was well
grounded. Music, especially when wedded to words, more especially
when those words are dramatic, cannot separate itself from emotion. It
will not do to tell us that a melody is a certain sequence of sounds; that
the composer chose it for its beauty of rhythm, form, and tune, and only
used the words to get it vocalised. We are forced to go farther back, and
ask ourselves, What suggested it in the first place to the composer?
why did he use it precisely in connection with this dramatic situation?
How can we answer these questions except by supposing that music
was for him the utterance through art of some emotion? The final fact
of human nature is emotion, crystallising itself in thought and language,
externalising itself in action and art. 'What,' said Novalis, 'are thoughts
but pale dead feelings?' Admitting this even in part, we cannot deny to
music an emotional content of some kind. I would go farther, and assert
that, while a merely mechanical musician may set inappropriate
melodies to words, and render music inexpressive of character, what
constitutes a musical dramatist is the conscious intention of fitting to
the words of his libretto such melody as shall interpret character, and
the power to do this with effect.
That the Cherubino of Mozart's Nozze is quite different from
Beaumarchais' Cherubin does not affect this question. He is a new
creation, just because Mozart could not, or would not, conceive the
character of the page in Beaumarchais' sprightly superficial spirit. He
used the part to utter something unutterable except by music about the
soul of the still adolescent lover. The libretto-part and the melodies,
taken together, constitute a new romantic ideal, consistent with
experience, but realised with the intensity and universality whereby art
is distinguished from life. Don Juan was a myth before Mozart touched
him with the magic wand of music. Cherubino became a myth by the
same Prospero's spell. Both characters have the universality, the
symbolic potency, which belongs to legendary beings. That there
remains a discrepancy between the boy-page and the music made for
him, can be conceded without danger to my theory; for the music made
for Cherubino is meant to interpret his psychical condition, and is
independent of his boyishness of conduct.
This further explains why there may be so many renderings of
Cherubino's melodies. Mozart idealised an infinite emotion. The singer
is forced to define; the actor also is forced to define. Each introduces
his own limit on the feeling. When the actor and the singer meet
together in one personality, this definition of emotion becomes of
necessity doubly specific. The condition of all music is that it depends
in a great measure on the temperament of the interpreter for its
momentary shade of expression, and this dependence is of course
exaggerated when the music is dramatic. Furthermore, the subjectivity
of the audience enters into the problem as still another element of
definition. It may therefore be fairly said that, in estimating any
impression produced by Cherubino's music, the original character of
the page, transplanted from French comedy to Italian opera, Mozart's
conception of that character, Mozart's specific quality of emotion and
specific style of musical utterance, together with the contralto's
interpretation of the character and rendering of the music, according to
her intellectual capacity, artistic skill, and timbre of voice, have
collaborated with the individuality of the hearer. Some of the
constituents of the ever-varying product--a product which is new each
time the part is played--are fixed. Da Ponte's Cherubino and Mozart's
melodies remain unalterable. All the rest is undecided; the singer and
the listener change on each occasion.
To assert that the musician Mozart meant nothing by his music, to
assert that he only cared about it quâ music, is the same as to say that
the painter Tintoretto, when he put the Crucifixion upon canvas, the
sculptor Michelangelo, when he carved Christ upon the lap of Mary,
meant nothing, and only cared about the beauty of their forms and
colours. Those who take up this position prove, not that the artist has
no meaning to convey, but that for them the artist's nature is
unintelligible, and his meaning is conveyed in an unknown tongue. It
seems superfluous to guard against misinterpretation by saying that to
expect clear definition from music--the definition which belongs to
poetry--would be absurd. The sphere of music is in sensuous perception;
the sphere of poetry is in intelligence. Music, dealing with pure sound,
must always be vaguer in significance than poetry, dealing with words.
Nevertheless, its effect upon the sentient subject may be more intense
and penetrating for this very reason. We cannot fail to understand what
words are intended to convey; we may very easily interpret in a
hundred different ways the message of sound. But this is not because
words are wider in their reach and more alive; rather because they are
more limited, more stereotyped, more dead. They symbolise something
precise and unmistakable; but this precision is itself attenuation of the
something symbolised. The exact value of the counter is better
understood when it is a word than when it is a chord, because all that a
word conveys has already become a thought, while all that musical
sounds convey remains within the region of emotion which has not
been intellectualised. Poetry touches emotion through the thinking
faculty. If music reaches the thinking faculty at all, it is through fibres
of emotion. But emotion, when it has become thought, has already lost
a portion of its force, and has taken to itself a something alien to its
nature. Therefore the message of music can never rightly be translated
into words. It is the very largeness and vividness of the sphere of
simple feeling which makes its symbolical counterpart in sound so
seeming vague. But in spite of this incontestable defect of seeming
vagueness, emotion expressed by music is nearer to our sentient self, if
we have ears to take it in, than the same emotion limited by language. It
is intenser, it is more immediate, as compensation for being less
intelligible, less unmistakable in meaning. It is an infinite, an indistinct,
where each consciousness defines and sets a limitary form.
V
A train of thought which begins with the concrete not unfrequently
finds itself finishing, almost against its will, in abstractions. This is the
point to which the performance of Cherubino's part by Pauline Lucca at
the Scala twenty years ago has led me--that I have to settle with myself
what I mean by art in general, and what I take to be the proper function
of music as one of the fine arts.
'Art,' said Goethe, 'is but form-giving.' We might vary this definition,
and say, 'Art is a method of expression or presentation.' Then comes the
question: If art gives form, if it is a method of expression or
presentation, to what does it give form, what does it express or present?
The answer certainly must be: Art gives form to human consciousness;
expresses or presents the feeling or the thought of man. Whatever else
art may do by the way, in the communication of innocent pleasures, in
the adornment of life and the softening of manners, in the creation of
beautiful shapes and sounds, this, at all events, is its prime function.
While investing thought, the spiritual subject-matter of all art, with
form, or finding for it proper modes of presentation, each of the arts
employs a special medium, obeying the laws of beauty proper to that
medium. The vehicles of the arts, roughly speaking, are material
substances (like stone, wood, metal), pigments, sounds, and words. The
masterly handling of these vehicles and the realisation of their
characteristic types of beauty have come to be regarded as the
craftsman's paramount concern. And in a certain sense this is a right
conclusion; for dexterity in the manipulation of the chosen vehicle and
power to create a beautiful object, distinguish the successful artist from
the man who may have had like thoughts and feelings. This dexterity,
this power, are the properties of the artist quâ artist. Yet we must not
forget that the form created by the artist for the expression of a thought
or feeling is not the final end of art itself. That form, after all, is but the
mode of presentation through which the spiritual content manifests
itself. Beauty, in like manner, is not the final end of art, but is the
indispensable condition under which the artistic manifestation of the
spiritual content must he made. It is the business of art to create an
ideal world, in which perception, emotion, understanding, action, all
elements of human life sublimed by thought, shall reappear in concrete
forms as beauty. This being so, the logical criticism of art demands that
we should not only estimate the technical skill of artists and their
faculty for presenting beauty to the æsthetic sense, but that we should
also ask ourselves what portion of the human spirit he has chosen to
invest with form, and how he has conceived his subject. It is not
necessary that the ideas embodied in a work of art should be the artist's
own. They may be common to the race and age: as, for instance, the
conception of sovereign deity expressed in the Olympian Zeus of
Pheidias, or the conception of divine maternity expressed in Raphael's
'Madonna di San Sisto.' Still the personality of the artist, his own
intellectual and moral nature, his peculiar way of thinking and feeling,
his individual attitude towards the material given to him in ideas of
human consciousness, will modify his choice of subject and of form,
and will determine his specific type of beauty. To take an example:
supposing that an idea, common to his race and age, is given to the
artist for treatment; this will be the final end of the work of art which
he produces. But his personal qualities and technical performance
determine the degree of success or failure to which he attains in
presenting that idea and in expressing it with beauty. Signorelli fails
where Perugino excels, in giving adequate and lovely form to the
religious sentiment. Michelangelo is sure of the sublime, and Raphael
of the beautiful.
Art is thus the presentation of the human spirit by the artist to his
fellow-men. The subject-matter of the arts is commensurate with what
man thinks and feels and does. It is as deep as religion, as wide as life.
But what distinguishes art from religion or from life is, that this
subject-matter must assume beautiful form, and must be presented
directly or indirectly to the senses. Art is not the school or the cathedral,
but the playground, the paradise of humanity. It does not teach, it does
not preach. Nothing abstract enters into art's domain. Truth and
goodness are transmuted into beauty there, just as in science beauty and
goodness assume the shape of truth, and in religion truth and beauty
become goodness. The rigid definitions, the unmistakable laws of
science, are not to be found in art. Whatever art has touched acquires a
concrete sensuous embodiment, and thus ideas presented to the mind in
art have lost a portion of their pure thought-essence. It is on this
account that the religious conceptions of the Greeks were so admirably
fitted for the art of sculpture, and certain portions of the mediæval
Christian mythology lent themselves so well to painting. For the same
reason the metaphysics of ecclesiastical dogma defy the artist's plastic
faculty. Art, in a word, is a middle term between reason and the senses.
Its secondary aim, after the prime end of presenting the human spirit in
beautiful form has been accomplished, is to give tranquil and innocent
enjoyment.
*****
From what has gone before it will be seen that no human being can
make or mould a beautiful form without incorporating in that form
some portion of the human mind, however crude, however elementary.
In other words, there is no work of art without a theme, without a
motive, without a subject. The presentation of that theme, that motive,
that subject, is the final end of art. The art is good or bad according as
the subject has been well or ill presented, consistently with the laws of
beauty special to the art itself. Thus we obtain two standards for
æsthetic criticism. We judge a statue, for example, both by the
sculptor's intellectual grasp upon his subject, and also by his technical
skill and sense of beauty. In a picture of the Last Judgment by Fra
Angelico we say that the bliss of the righteous has been more
successfully treated than the torments of the wicked, because the
former has been better understood, although the painter's skill in each is
equal. In the Perseus of Cellini we admire the sculptor's spirit, finish of
execution, and originality of design, while we deplore that want of
sympathy with the heroic character which makes his type of physical
beauty slightly vulgar and his facial expression vacuous. If the phrase
'Art for art's sake' has any meaning, this meaning is simply that the
artist, having chosen a theme, thinks exclusively in working at it of
technical dexterity or the quality of beauty. There are many
inducements for the artist thus to narrow his function, and for the critic
to assist him by applying the canons of a soulless connoisseurship to
his work; for the conception of the subject is but the starting-point in
art-production, and the artist's difficulties and triumphs as a craftsman
lie in the region of technicalities. He knows, moreover, that, however
deep or noble his idea may be, his work of art will be worthless if it fail
in skill or be devoid of beauty. What converts a thought into a statue or
a picture, is the form found for it; and so the form itself seems
all-important. The artist, therefore, too easily imagines that he may
neglect his theme; that a fine piece of colouring, a well-balanced
composition, or, as Cellini put it, 'un bel corpo ignudo,' is enough. And
this is especially easy in an age which reflects much upon the arts, and
pursues them with enthusiasm, while its deeper thoughts and feelings
are not of the kind which translate themselves readily into artistic form.
But, after all, a fine piece of colouring, a well-balanced composition, a
sonorous stanza, a learned essay in counterpoint, are not enough. They
are all excellent good things, yielding delight to the artistic sense and
instruction to the student. Yet when we think of the really great statues,
pictures, poems, music of the world, we find that these are really great
because of something more--and that more is their theme, their
presentation of a noble portion of the human soul. Artists and
art-students may be satisfied with perfect specimens of a craftsman's
skill, independent of his theme; but the mass of men will not be
satisfied; and it is as wrong to suppose that art exists for artists and
art-students, as to talk of art for art's sake. Art exists for humanity. Art
transmutes thought and feeling into terms of beautiful form. Art is great
and lasting in proportion as it appeals to the human consciousness at
large, presenting to it portions of itself in adequate and lovely form.
VI
It was necessary in the first place firmly to apprehend the truth that the
final end of all art is the presentation of a spiritual content; it is
necessary in the next place to remove confusions by considering the
special circumstances of the several arts.
Each art has its own vehicle of presentation. What it can present and
how it must present it, depends upon the nature of this vehicle. Thus,
though architecture, sculpture, painting, music, poetry, meet upon the
common ground of spiritualised experience--though the works of art
produced by the architect, sculptor, painter, musician, poet, emanate
from the spiritual nature of the race, are coloured by the spiritual nature
of the men who make them, and express what is spiritual in humanity
under concrete forms invented for them by the artist--yet it is certain
that all of these arts do not deal exactly with the same portions of this
common material in the same way or with the same results. Each has its
own department. Each exhibits qualities of strength and weakness
special to itself. To define these several departments, to explain the
relation of these several vehicles of presentation to the common
subject-matter, is the next step in criticism.
*****
Of the fine arts, architecture alone subserves utility. We build for use.
But the geometrical proportions which the architect observes, contain
the element of beauty and powerfully influence the soul. Into the
language of arch and aisle and colonnade, of cupola and façade and
pediment, of spire and vault, the architect translates emotion, vague
perhaps but deep, mute but unmistakable. When we say that a building
is sublime or graceful, frivolous or stern, we mean that sublimity or
grace, frivolity or sternness, is inherent in it. The emotions connected
with these qualities are inspired in us when we contemplate it, and are
presented to us by its form. Whether the architect deliberately aimed at
the sublime or graceful--whether the dignified serenity of the Athenian
genius sought to express itself in the Parthenon, and the mysticism of
mediæval Christianity in the gloom of Chartres Cathedral--whether it
was Renaissance paganism which gave its mundane pomp and glory to
S. Peter's, and the refined selfishness of royalty its specious splendour
to the palace of Versailles--need not be curiously questioned. The fact
that we are impelled to raise these points, that architecture more almost
than any art connects itself indissolubly with the life, the character, the
moral being of a nation and an epoch, proves that we are justified in
bringing it beneath our general definition of the arts. In a great measure
because it subserves utility, and is therefore dependent upon the
necessities of life, does architecture present to us through form the
human spirit. Comparing the palace built by Giulio Romano for the
Dukes of Mantua with the contemporary castle of a German prince, we
cannot fail at once to comprehend the difference of spiritual conditions,
as these displayed themselves in daily life, which then separated Italy
from the Teutonic nations. But this is not all. Spiritual quality in the
architect himself finds clear expression in his work. Coldness combined
with violence marks Brunelleschi's churches; a certain suavity and
well-bred taste the work of Bramante; while Michelangelo exhibits
wayward energy in his Library of S. Lorenzo, and Amadeo
self-abandonment to fancy in his Lombard chapels. I have chosen
examples from one nation and one epoch in order that the point I seek
to make, the demonstration of a spiritual quality in buildings, may be
fairly stated.
*****
Sculpture and painting distinguish themselves from the other fine arts
by the imitation of concrete existences in nature. They copy the bodies
of men and animals, the aspects of the world around us, and the
handiwork of men. Yet, in so far as they are rightly arts, they do not
make imitation an object in itself. The grapes of Zeuxis at which birds
pecked, the painted dog at which a cat's hair bristles--if such grapes or
such a dog were ever put on canvas--are but evidences of the artist's
skill, not of his faculty as artist. These two plastic, or, as I prefer to call
them, figurative arts, use their imitation of the external world for the
expression, the presentation of internal, spiritual things. The human
form is for them the outward symbol of the inner human spirit, and
their power of presenting spirit is limited by the means at their disposal.
Sculpture employs stone, wood, clay, the precious metals, to model
forms, detached and independent, or raised upon a flat surface in relief.
Its domain is the whole range of human character and consciousness, in
so far as these can be indicated by fixed facial expression, by physical
type, and by attitude. If we dwell for an instant on the greatest
historical epoch of sculpture, we shall understand the domain of this art
in its range and limitation. At a certain point of Greek development the
Hellenic Pantheon began to be translated by the sculptors into statues;
and when the genius of the Greeks expired in Rome, the cycle of their
psychological conceptions had been exhaustively presented through
this medium. During that long period of time, the most delicate
gradations of human personality, divinised, idealised, were presented to
the contemplation of the consciousness which gave them being, in
appropriate types. Strength and swiftness, massive force and airy
lightness, contemplative repose and active energy, voluptuous softness
and refined grace, intellectual sublimity and lascivious
seductiveness--the whole rhythm of qualities which can be typified by
bodily form--were analysed, selected, combined in various degrees, to
incarnate the religious conceptions of Zeus, Aphrodite, Herakles,
Dionysus, Pallas, Fauns and Satyrs, Nymphs of woods and waves,
Tritons, the genius of Death, heroes and hunters, lawgivers and poets,
presiding deities of minor functions, man's lustful appetites and sensual
needs. All that men think, or do, or are, or wish for, or imagine in this
world, had found exact corporeal equivalents. Not physiognomy alone,
but all the portions of the body upon which the habits of the animating
soul are wont to stamp themselves, were studied and employed as
symbolism. Uranian Aphrodite was distinguished from her Pandemic
sister by chastened lust-repelling loveliness. The muscles of Herakles
were more ponderous than the tense sinews of Achilles. The Hermes of
the palæstra bore a torso of majestic depth; the Hermes, who carried
messages from heaven, had limbs alert for movement. The brows of
Zeus inspired awe; the breasts of Dionysus breathed delight.
A race accustomed, as the Greeks were, to read this symbolism,
accustomed, as the Greeks were, to note the individuality of naked form,
had no difficulty in interpreting the language of sculpture. Nor is there
now much difficulty in the task. Our surest guide to the subject of a
basrelief or statue is study of the physical type considered as
symbolical of spiritual quality. From the fragment of a torso the true
critic can say whether it belongs to the athletic or the erotic species. A
limb of Bacchus differs from a limb of Poseidon. The whole
psychological conception of Aphrodite Pandemos enters into every
muscle, every joint, no less than into her physiognomy, her hair, her
attitude.
There is, however, a limit to the domain of sculpture. This art deals
most successfully with personified generalities. It is also strong in the
presentation of incarnate character. But when it attempts to tell a story,
we often seek in vain its meaning. Battles of Amazons or Centaurs
upon basreliefs, indeed, are unmistakable. The subject is indicated here
by some external sign. The group of Laocoon appeals at once to a
reader of Virgil, and the divine vengeance of Leto's children upon
Niobe is manifest in the Uffizzi marbles. But who are the several
heroes of the Æginetan pediment, and what was the subject of the
Pheidian statues on the Parthenon? Do the three graceful figures of a
basrelief which exists at Naples and in the Villa Albani, represent
Orpheus, Hermes, and Eurydice, or Antiope and her two sons? Was the
winged and sworded genius upon the Ephesus column meant for a
genius of Death or a genius of Love?
This dimness of significance indicates the limitation of sculpture, and
inclines some of those who feel its charm to assert that the sculptor
seeks to convey no intellectual meaning, that he is satisfied with the
creation of beautiful form. There is sense in this revolt against the faith
which holds that art is nothing but a mode of spiritual presentation.
Truly the artist aims at producing beauty, is satisfied if he conveys
delight. But it is impossible to escape from the certainty that, while he
is creating forms of beauty, he means something; and that something,
that theme for which he finds the form, is part of the world's spiritual
heritage. Only the crudest works of plastic art, capricci and arabesques,
have no intellectual content; and even these are good in so far as they
convey the playfulness of fancy.
Painting employs colours upon surfaces--walls, panels, canvas. What
has been said about sculpture will apply in a great measure to this art.
The human form, the world around us, the works of man's hands, are
represented in painting, not for their own sake merely, but with a view
to bringing thought, feeling, action, home to the consciousness of the
spectator from the artist's consciousness on which they have been
impressed. Painting can tell a story better than sculpture, can represent
more complicated feelings, can suggest thoughts of a subtler intricacy.
Through colour, it can play, like music, directly on powerful but vague
emotion. It is deficient in fulness and roundness of concrete reality. A
statue stands before us, the soul incarnate in ideal form, fixed and
frozen for eternity. The picture is a reflection cast upon a magic glass;
not less permanent, but reduced to a shadow of reality. To follow these
distinctions farther would be alien from the present purpose. It is
enough to repeat that, within their several spheres, according to their
several strengths and weaknesses, both sculpture and painting present
the spirit to us only as the spirit shows itself immersed in things of
sense. The light of a lamp enclosed within an alabaster vase is still
lamplight, though shorn of lustre and toned to coloured softness. Even
thus the spirit, immersed in things of sense presented to us by the
figurative arts, is still spirit, though diminished in its intellectual
clearness and invested with hues not its own. To fashion that alabaster
form of art with utmost skill, to make it beautiful, to render it
transparent, is the artist's function. But he will have failed of the highest
if the light within burns dim, or if he gives the world a lamp in which
no spiritual flame is lighted.
*****
Music transports us to a different region. It imitates nothing. It uses
pure sound, and sound of the most wholly artificial kind--so artificial
that the musical sounds of one race are unmusical, and therefore
unintelligible, to another. Like architecture, music relies upon
mathematical proportions. Unlike architecture, music serves no utility.
It is the purest art of pleasure--the truest paradise and playground of the
spirit. It has less power than painting, even less power than sculpture,
to tell a story or to communicate an idea. For we must remember that
when music is married to words, the words, and not the music, reach
our thinking faculty. And yet, in spite of all, music presents man's spirit
to itself through form. The domain of the spirit over which music
reigns, is emotion--not defined emotion, not feeling even so defined as
jealousy or anger--but those broad bases of man's being out of which
emotions spring, defining themselves through action into this or that set
type of feeling. Architecture, we have noticed, is so connected with
specific modes of human existence, that from its main examples we can
reconstruct the life of men who used it. Sculpture and painting, by
limiting their presentation to the imitation of external things, have all
the help which experience and, association render. The mere
artificiality of music's vehicle separates it from life and makes its
message untranslatable. Yet, as I have already pointed out, this very
disability under which it labours is the secret of its extraordinary
potency. Nothing intervenes between the musical work of art and the
fibres of the sentient being it immediately thrills. We do not seek to say
what music means. We feel the music. And if a man should pretend
that the music has not passed beyond his ears, has communicated
nothing but a musical delight, he simply tells us that he has not felt
music. The ancients on this point were wiser than some moderns when,
without pretending to assign an intellectual significance to music, they
held it for an axiom that one type of music bred one type of character,
another type another. A change in the music of a state, wrote Plato, will
be followed by changes in its constitution. It is of the utmost
importance, said Aristotle, to provide in education for the use of the
ennobling and the fortifying moods. These philosophers knew that
music creates a spiritual world, in which the spirit cannot live and
move without contracting habits of emotion. In this vagueness of
significance but intensity of feeling lies the magic of music. A melody
occurs to the composer, which he certainly connects with no act of the
reason, which he is probably unconscious of connecting with any
movement of his feeling, but which nevertheless is the form in sound of
an emotional mood. When he reflects upon the melody secreted thus
impromptu, he is aware, as we learn from his own lips, that this work
has correspondence with emotion. Beethoven calls one symphony
Heroic, another Pastoral; of the opening of another he says, 'Fate
knocks at the door.' Mozart sets comic words to the mass-music of a
friend, in order to mark his sense of its inaptitude for religious
sentiment. All composers use phrases like Maestoso, Pomposo, Allegro,
Lagrimoso, Con Fuoco, to express the general complexion of the mood
their music ought to represent.
*****
Before passing to poetry, it may be well to turn aside and consider two
subordinate arts, which deserve a place in any system of æsthetics.
These are dancing and acting. Dancing uses the living human form, and
presents feeling or action, the passions and the deeds of men, in
artificially educated movements of the body. The element of beauty it
possesses, independently of the beauty of the dancer, is rhythm. Acting
or the art of mimicry presents the same subject-matter, no longer under
the conditions of fixed rhythm but as an ideal reproduction of reality.
The actor is what he represents, and the element of beauty in his art is
perfection of realisation. It is his duty as an artist to show us Orestes or
Othello, not perhaps exactly as Othello and Orestes were, but as the
essence of their tragedies, ideally incorporate in action, ought to be.
The actor can do this in dumb show. Some of the greatest actors of the
ancient world were mimes. But he usually interprets a poet's thought,
and attempts to present an artistic conception in a secondary form of art,
which has for its advantage his own personality in play.
*****
The last of the fine arts is literature; or, in the narrower sphere of which
it will be well to speak here only, is poetry. Poetry employs words in
fixed rhythms, which we call metres. Only a small portion of its effect
is derived from the beauty of its sound. It appeals to the sense of
hearing far less immediately than music does. It makes no appeal to the
eyesight, and takes no help from the beauty of colour. It produces no
tangible object. But language being the storehouse of all human
experience, language being the medium whereby spirit communicates
with spirit in affairs of life, the vehicle which transmits to us the
thoughts and feelings of the past, and on which we rely for continuing
our present to the future, it follows that, of all the arts, poetry soars
highest, flies widest, and is most at home in the region of the spirit.
What poetry lacks of sensuous fulness, it more than balances by
intellectual intensity. Its significance is unmistakable, because it
employs the very material men use in their exchange of thoughts and
correspondence of emotions. To the bounds of its empire there is no
end. It embraces in its own more abstract being all the arts. By words it
does the work in turn of architecture, sculpture, painting, music. It is
the metaphysic of the fine arts. Philosophy finds place in poetry; and
life itself, refined to its last utterance, hangs trembling on this thread
which joins our earth to heaven, this bridge between experience and the
realms where unattainable and imperceptible will have no meaning.
If we are right in defining art as the manifestation of the human spirit to
man by man in beautiful form, poetry, more incontestably than any
other art, fulfils this definition and enables us to gauge its accuracy. For
words are the spirit, manifested to itself in symbols with no sensual
alloy. Poetry is therefore the presentation, through words, of life and all
that life implies. Perception, emotion, thought, action, find in
descriptive, lyrical, reflective, dramatic, and epical poetry their
immediate apocalypse. In poetry we are no longer puzzled with
problems as to whether art has or has not of necessity a spiritual
content. There cannot be any poetry whatsoever without a spiritual
meaning of some sort: good or bad, moral, immoral, or non-moral,
obscure or lucid, noble or ignoble, slight or weighty--such distinctions
do not signify. In poetry we are not met by questions whether the poet
intended to convey a meaning when he made it. Quite meaningless
poetry (as some critics would fain find melody quite meaningless, or a
statue meaningless, or a Venetian picture meaningless) is a
contradiction in terms. In poetry, life, or a portion of life, lives again,
resuscitated and presented to our mental faculty through art. The best
poetry is that which reproduces the most of life, or its intensest
moments. Therefore the extensive species of the drama and the epic,
the intensive species of the lyric, have been ever held in highest esteem.
Only a half-crazy critic flaunts the paradox that poetry is excellent in so
far as it assimilates the vagueness of music, or estimates a poet by his
power of translating sense upon the borderland of nonsense into
melodious words. Where poetry falls short in the comparison with
other arts, is in the quality of form-giving, in the quality of sensuous
concreteness. Poetry can only present forms to the mental eye and to
the intellectual sense, stimulate the physical senses by indirect
suggestion. Therefore dramatic poetry, the most complicated kind of
poetry, relies upon the actor; and lyrical poetry, the intensest kind of
poetry, seeks the aid of music. But these comparative deficiencies are
overbalanced, for all the highest purposes of art, by the width and depth,
the intelligibility and power, the flexibility and multitudinous
associations, of language. The other arts are limited in what they utter.
There is nothing which has entered into the life of man which poetry
cannot express. Poetry says everything in man's own language to the
mind. The other arts appeal imperatively, each in its own region, to
man's senses; and the mind receives art's message by the help of
symbols from the world of sense. Poetry lacks this immediate appeal to
sense. But the elixir which it offers to the mind, its quintessence
extracted from all things of sense, reacts through intellectual perception
upon all the faculties that make men what they are.
VII
I used a metaphor in one of the foregoing paragraphs to indicate the
presence of the vital spirit, the essential element of thought or feeling,
in the work of art. I said it radiated through the form, as lamplight
through an alabaster vase. Now the skill of the artist is displayed in
modelling that vase, in giving it shape, rich and rare, and fashioning its
curves with subtlest workmanship. In so far as he is a craftsman, the
artist's pains must be bestowed upon this precious vessel of the
animating theme. In so far as he has power over beauty, he must exert it
in this plastic act. It is here that he displays dexterity; here that he
creates; here that he separates himself from other men who think and
feel. The poet, more perhaps than any other artist, needs to keep this
steadily in view; for words being our daily vehicle of utterance, it may
well chance that the alabaster vase of language should be hastily or
trivially modelled. This is the true reason why 'neither gods nor men
nor the columns either suffer mediocrity in singers.' Upon the poet it is
specially incumbent to see that he has something rare to say and some
rich mode of saying it. The figurative arts need hardly be so cautioned.
They run their risk in quite a different direction. For sculptor and for
painter, the danger is lest he should think that alabaster vase his final
task. He may too easily be satisfied with moulding a beautiful but
empty form.
*****
The last word on the topic of the arts is given in one sentence. Let us
remember that every work of art enshrines a spiritual subject, and that
the artist's power is shown in finding for that subject a form of ideal
loveliness. Many kindred points remain to be discussed; as what we
mean by beauty, which is a condition indispensable to noble art; and
what are the relations of the arts to ethics. These questions cannot now
be raised. It is enough in one essay to have tried to vindicate the
spirituality of art in general.
*****
A VENETIAN MEDLEY
I.--FIRST IMPRESSIONS AND FAMILIARITY
It is easy to feel and to say something obvious about Venice. The
influence of this sea-city is unique, immediate, and unmistakable. But
to express the sober truth of those impressions which remain when the
first astonishment of the Venetian revelation has subsided, when the
spirit of the place has been harmonised through familiarity with our
habitual mood, is difficult.
Venice inspires at first an almost Corybantic rapture. From our earliest
visits, if these have been measured by days rather than weeks, we carry
away with us the memory of sunsets emblazoned in gold and crimson
upon cloud and water; of violet domes and bell-towers etched against
the orange of a western sky; of moonlight silvering breeze-rippled
breadths of liquid blue; of distant islands shimmering in sun-litten haze;
of music and black gliding boats; of labyrinthine darkness made for
mysteries of love and crime; of statue-fretted palace fronts; of brazen
clangour and a moving crowd; of pictures by earth's proudest painters,
cased in gold on walls of council chambers where Venice sat enthroned
a queen, where nobles swept the floors with robes of Tyrian brocade.
These reminiscences will be attended by an ever-present sense of
loneliness and silence in the world around; the sadness of a limitless
horizon, the solemnity of an unbroken arch of heaven, the calm and
greyness of evening on the lagoons, the pathos of a marble city
crumbling to its grave in mud and brine.
These first impressions of Venice are true. Indeed they are inevitable.
They abide, and form a glowing background for all subsequent pictures,
toned more austerely, and painted in more lasting hues of truth upon
the brain. Those have never felt Venice at all who have not known this
primal rapture, or who perhaps expected more of colour, more of
melodrama, from a scene which nature and the art of man have made
the richest in these qualities. Yet the mood engendered by this first
experience is not destined to be permanent. It contains an element of
unrest and unreality which vanishes upon familiarity. From the blare of
that triumphal bourdon of brass instruments emerge the delicate voices
of violin and clarinette. To the contrasted passions of our earliest love
succeed a multitude of sweet and fanciful emotions. It is my present
purpose to recapture some of the impressions made by Venice in more
tranquil moods. Memory might be compared to a kaleidoscope. Far
away from Venice I raise the wonder-working tube, allow the glittering
fragments to settle as they please, and with words attempt to render
something of the patterns I behold.
II.--A LODGING IN SAN VIO
I have escaped from the hotels with their bustle of tourists and crowded
tables-d'hôte. My garden stretches down to the Grand Canal, closed at
the end with a pavilion, where I lounge and smoke and watch the
cornice of the Prefettura fretted with gold in sunset light. My
sitting-room and bed-room face the southern sun. There is a canal
below, crowded with gondolas, and across its bridge the good folk of
San Vio come and go the whole day long--men in blue shirts with
enormous hats, and jackets slung on their left shoulder; women in
kerchiefs of orange and crimson. Barelegged boys sit upon the parapet,
dangling their feet above the rising tide. A hawker passes, balancing a
basket full of live and crawling crabs. Barges filled with Brenta water
or Mirano wine take up their station at the neighbouring steps, and then
ensues a mighty splashing and hurrying to and fro of men with tubs
upon their heads. The brawny fellows in the wine-barge are red from
brows to breast with drippings of the vat. And now there is a bustle in
the quarter. A barca has arrived from S. Erasmo, the island of the
market-gardens. It is piled with gourds and pumpkins, cabbages and
tomatoes, pomegranates and pears--a pyramid of gold and green and
scarlet. Brown men lift the fruit aloft, and women bending from the
pathway bargain for it. A clatter of chaffering tongues, a ring of
coppers, a Babel of hoarse sea-voices, proclaim the sharpness of the
struggle. When the quarter has been served, the boat sheers off
diminished in its burden. Boys and girls are left seasoning their polenta
with a slice of zucca, while the mothers of a score of families go
pattering up yonder courtyard with the material for their husbands'
supper in their handkerchiefs. Across the canal, or more correctly the
Rio, opens a wide grass-grown court. It is lined on the right hand by a
row of poor dwellings, swarming with gondoliers' children. A garden
wall runs along the other side, over which I can see pomegranate-trees
in fruit and pergolas of vines. Far beyond are more low houses, and
then the sky, swept with sea-breezes, and the masts of an ocean-going
ship against the dome and turrets of Palladio's Redentore.
This is my home. By day it is as lively as a scene in Masaniello. By
night, after nine o'clock, the whole stir of the quarter has subsided. Far
away I hear the bell of some church tell the hours. But no noise disturbs
my rest, unless perhaps a belated gondolier moors his boat beneath the
window. My one maid, Catina, sings at her work the whole day through.
My gondolier, Francesco, acts as valet. He wakes me in the morning,
opens the shutters, brings sea-water for my bath, and takes his orders
for the day. 'Will it do for Chioggia, Francesco?' 'Sissignore! The
Signorino has set off in his sandolo already with Antonio. The Signora
is to go with us in the gondola.' 'Then get three more men, Francesco,
and see that all of them can sing.'
III.--TO CHIOGGIA WITH OAR AND SAIL
The sandolo is a boat shaped like the gondola, but smaller and lighter,
without benches, and without the high steel prow or ferro which
distinguishes the gondola. The gunwale is only just raised above the
water, over which the little craft skims with a rapid bounding motion,
affording an agreeable variation from the stately swanlike movement of
the gondola. In one of these boats--called by him the Fisolo or
Seamew--my friend Eustace had started with Antonio, intending to row
the whole way to Chioggia, or, if the breeze favoured, to hoist a sail
and help himself along. After breakfast, when the crew for my gondola
had been assembled, Francesco and I followed with the Signora. It was
one of those perfect mornings which occur as a respite from broken
weather, when the air is windless and the light falls soft through haze
on the horizon. As we broke into the lagoon behind the Redentore, the
islands in front of us, S. Spirito, Poveglia, Malamocco, seemed as
though they were just lifted from the sea-line. The Euganeans, far away
to westward, were bathed in mist, and almost blent with the blue sky.
Our four rowers put their backs into their work; and soon we reached
the port of Malamocco, where a breeze from the Adriatic caught us
sideways for a while. This is the largest of the breaches in the Lidi, or
raised sand-reefs, which protect Venice from the sea: it affords an
entrance to vessels of draught like the steamers of the Peninsular and
Oriental Company. We crossed the dancing wavelets of the port; but
when we passed under the lee of Pelestrina, the breeze failed, and the
lagoon was once again a sheet of undulating glass. At S. Pietro on this
island a halt was made to give the oarsmen wine, and here we saw the
women at their cottage doorways making lace. The old lace industry of
Venice has recently been revived. From Burano and Pelestrina cargoes
of hand-made imitations of the ancient fabrics are sent at intervals to
Jesurun's magazine at S. Marco. He is the chief impresario of the trade,
employing hundreds of hands, and speculating for a handsome profit in
the foreign market on the price he gives his workwomen.
Now we are well lost in the lagoons--Venice no longer visible behind;
the Alps and Euganeans shrouded in a noonday haze; the lowlands at
the mouth of Brenta marked by clumps of trees ephemerally faint in
silver silhouette against the filmy, shimmering horizon. Form and
colour have disappeared in light-irradiated vapour of an opal hue. And
yet instinctively we know that we are not at sea; the different quality of
the water, the piles emerging here and there above the surface, the
suggestion of coast-lines scarcely felt in this infinity of lustre, all
remind us that our voyage is confined to the charmed limits of an
inland lake. At length the jutting headland of Pelestrina was reached.
We broke across the Porto di Chioggia, and saw Chioggia itself
ahead--a huddled mass of houses low upon the water. One by one, as
we rowed steadily, the fishing-boats passed by, emerging from their
harbour for a twelve hours' cruise upon the open sea. In a long line they
came, with variegated sails of orange, red, and saffron, curiously
chequered at the corners, and cantled with devices in contrasted tints. A
little land-breeze carried them forward. The lagoon reflected their deep
colours till they reached the port. Then, slightly swerving eastward on
their course, but still in single file, they took the sea and scattered, like
beautiful bright-plumaged birds, who from a streamlet float into a lake,
and find their way at large according as each wills.
The Signorino and Antonio, though want of wind obliged them to row
the whole way from Venice, had reached Chioggia an hour before, and
stood waiting to receive us on the quay. It is a quaint town this
Chioggia, which has always lived a separate life from that of Venice.
Language and race and customs have held the two populations apart
from those distant years when Genoa and the Republic of S. Mark
fought their duel to the death out in the Chioggian harbours, down to
these days, when your Venetian gondolier will tell you that the
Chioggoto loves his pipe more than his donna or his wife. The main
canal is lined with substantial palaces, attesting to old wealth and
comfort. But from Chioggia, even more than from Venice, the tide of
modern luxury and traffic has retreated. The place is left to fishing folk
and builders of the fishing craft, whose wharves still form the liveliest
quarter. Wandering about its wide deserted courts and calli, we feel the
spirit of the decadent Venetian nobility. Passages from Goldoni's and
Casanova's Memoirs occur to our memory. It seems easy to realise
what they wrote about the dishevelled gaiety and lawless license of
Chioggia in the days of powder, sword-knot, and soprani. Baffo walks
beside us in hypocritical composure of bag-wig and senatorial dignity,
whispering unmentionable sonnets in his dialect of Xe and Ga.
Somehow or another that last dotage of S. Mark's decrepitude is more
recoverable by our fancy than the heroism of Pisani in the fourteenth
century. From his prison in blockaded Venice the great admiral was
sent forth on a forlorn hope, and blocked victorious Doria here with
boats on which the nobles of the Golden Book had spent their fortunes.
Pietro Doria boasted that with his own hands he would bridle the
bronze horses of S. Mark. But now he found himself between the navy
of Carlo Zeno in the Adriatic and the flotilla led by Vittore Pisani
across the lagoon. It was in vain that the Republic of S. George strained
every nerve to send him succour from the Ligurian sea; in vain that the
lords of Padua kept opening communications with him from the
mainland. From the 1st of January 1380 till the 21st of June the
Venetians pressed the blockade ever closer, grappling their foemen in a
grip that if relaxed one moment would have hurled him at their throats.
The long and breathless struggle ended in the capitulation at Chioggia
of what remained of Doria's forty-eight galleys and fourteen thousand
men.
These great deeds are far away and hazy. The brief sentences of
mediæval annalists bring them less near to us than the chroniques
scandaleuses of good-for-nothing scoundrels, whose vulgar adventures
might be revived at the present hour with scarce a change of setting.
Such is the force of intimité in literature. And yet Baffo and Casanova
are as much of the past as Doria and Pisani. It is only perhaps that the
survival of decadence in all we see around us, forms a fitting
framework for our recollections of their vividly described corruption.
Not far from the landing-place a balustraded bridge of ample breadth
and large bravura manner spans the main canal. Like everything at
Chioggia, it is dirty and has fallen from its first estate. Yet neither time
nor injury can obliterate style or wholly degrade marble. Hard by the
bridge there are two rival inns. At one of these we ordered a
seadinner--crabs, cuttlefishes, soles, and turbots--which we ate at a
table in the open air. Nothing divided us from the street except a row of
Japanese privet-bushes in hooped tubs. Our banquet soon assumed a
somewhat unpleasant similitude to that of Dives; for the Chioggoti, in
all stages of decrepitude and squalor, crowded round to beg for
scraps--indescribable old women, enveloped in their own petticoats
thrown over their heads; girls hooded with sombre black mantles; old
men wrinkled beyond recognition by their nearest relatives; jabbering,
half-naked boys; slow, slouching fishermen with clay pipes in their
mouths and philosophical acceptance on their sober foreheads.
That afternoon the gondola and sandolo were lashed together side by
side. Two sails were raised, and in this lazy fashion we stole
homewards, faster or slower according as the breeze freshened or
slackened, landing now and then on islands, sauntering along the
sea-walls which bulwark Venice from the Adriatic, and singing--those
at least of us who had the power to sing. Four of our Venetians had
trained voices and memories of inexhaustible music. Over the level
water, with the ripple plashing at our keel, their songs went abroad, and
mingled with the failing day. The barcaroles and serenades peculiar to
Venice were, of course, in harmony with the occasion. But some
transcripts from classical operas were even more attractive, through the
dignity with which these men invested them. By the peculiarity of their
treatment the recitativo of the stage assumed a solemn movement,
marked in rhythm, which removed it from the commonplace into
antiquity, and made me understand how cultivated music may pass
back by natural, unconscious transition into the realm of popular
melody.
The sun sank, not splendidly, but quietly in banks of clouds above the
Alps. Stars came out, uncertainly at first, and then in strength, reflected
on the sea. The men of the Dogana watch-boat challenged us and let us
pass. Madonna's lamp was twinkling from her shrine upon the
harbour-pile. The city grew before us. Stealing into Venice in that
calm--stealing silently and shadowlike, with scarce a ruffle of the water,
the masses of the town emerging out of darkness into twilight, till San
Giorgio's gun boomed with a flash athwart our stern, and the gas-lamps
of the Piazzetta swam into sight; all this was like a long enchanted
chapter of romance. And now the music of our men had sunk to one
faint whistling from Eustace of tunes in harmony with whispers at the
prow.
Then came the steps of the Palazzo Venier and the deep-scented
darkness of the garden. As we passed through to supper, I plucked a
spray of yellow Banksia rose, and put it in my buttonhole. The dew was
on its burnished leaves, and evening had drawn forth its perfume.
IV.--MORNING RAMBLES
A story is told of Poussin, the French painter, that when he was asked
why he would not stay in Venice, he replied, 'If I stay here, I shall
become a colourist!' A somewhat similar tale is reported of a
fashionable English decorator. While on a visit to friends in Venice, he
avoided every building which contains a Tintoretto, averring that the
sight of Tintoretto's pictures would injure his carefully trained taste. It
is probable that neither anecdote is strictly true. Yet there is a certain
epigrammatic point in both; and I have often speculated whether even
Venice could have so warped the genius of Poussin as to shed one ray
of splendour on his canvases, or whether even Tintoretto could have so
sublimed the prophet of Queen Anne as to make him add dramatic
passion to a London drawing-room. Anyhow, it is exceedingly difficult
to escape from colour in the air of Venice, or from Tintoretto in her
buildings. Long, delightful mornings may be spent in the enjoyment of
the one and the pursuit of the other by folk who have no classical or
pseudo-mediæval theories to oppress them.
Tintoretto's house, though changed, can still be visited. It formed part
of the Fondamenta dei Mori, so called from having been the quarter
assigned to Moorish traders in Venice. A spirited carving of a turbaned
Moor leading a camel charged with merchandise, remains above the
waterline of a neighbouring building; and all about the crumbling walls
sprout flowering weeds--samphire and snapdragon and the spiked
campanula, which shoots a spire of sea-blue stars from chinks of Istrian
stone.
The house stands opposite the Church of Santa Maria dell' Orto, where
Tintoretto was buried, and where four of his chief masterpieces are to
be seen. This church, swept and garnished, is a triumph of modern
Italian restoration. They have contrived to make it as commonplace as
human ingenuity could manage. Yet no malice of ignorant industry can
obscure the treasures it contains--the pictures of Cima, Gian Bellini,
Palma, and the four Tintorettos, which form its crowning glory. Here
the master may be studied in four of his chief moods: as the painter of
tragic passion and movement, in the huge 'Last Judgment;' as the
painter of impossibilities, in the 'Vision of Moses upon Sinai;' as the
painter of purity and tranquil pathos, in the 'Miracle of S. Agnes;' as the
painter of Biblical history brought home to daily life, in the
'Presentation of the Virgin.' Without leaving the Madonna dell' Orto, a
student can explore his genius in all its depth and breadth; comprehend
the enthusiasm he excites in those who seek, as the essentials of art,
imaginative boldness and sincerity; understand what is meant by
adversaries who maintain that, after all, Tintoretto was but an inspired
Gustave Doré. Between that quiet canvas of the 'Presentation,' so
modest in its cool greys and subdued gold, and the tumult of flying,
running? doesn't make much sense, but can't figure out a plausible
alternative, ascending figures in the 'Judgment,' what an interval there
is! How strangely the white lamb-like maiden, kneeling beside her
lamb in the picture of S. Agnes, contrasts with the dusky gorgeousness
of the Hebrew women despoiling themselves of jewels for the golden
calf! Comparing these several manifestations of creative power, we feel
ourselves in the grasp of a painter who was essentially a poet, one for
whom his art was the medium for expressing before all things thought
and passion. Each picture is executed in the manner suited to its tone of
feeling, the key of its conception.
Elsewhere than in the Madonna dell' Orto there are more distinguished
single examples of Tintoretto's realising faculty. The 'Last Supper' in
San Giorgio, for instance, and the 'Adoration of the Shepherds' in the
Scuola di San Rocco illustrate his unique power of presenting sacred
history in a novel, romantic framework of familiar things. The
commonplace circumstances of ordinary life have been employed to
portray in the one case a lyric of mysterious splendour; in the other, an
idyll of infinite sweetness. Divinity shines through the rafters of that
upper chamber, where round a low large table the Apostles are
assembled in a group translated from the social customs of the painter's
days. Divinity is shed upon the straw-spread manger, where Christ lies
sleeping in the loft, with shepherds crowding through the room
beneath.
A studied contrast between the simplicity and repose of the central
figure and the tumult of passions in the multitude around, may be
observed in the 'Miracle of S. Agnes.' It is this which gives dramatic
vigour to the composition. But the same effect is carried to its highest
fulfilment, with even a loftier beauty, in the episode of Christ before
the judgment-seat of Pilate, at San Rocco. Of all Tintoretto's religious
pictures, that is the most profoundly felt, the most majestic. No other
artist succeeded as he has here succeeded in presenting to us God
incarnate. For this Christ is not merely the just man, innocent, silent
before his accusers. The stationary, white-draped figure, raised high
above the agitated crowd, with tranquil forehead slightly bent, facing
his perplexed and fussy judge, is more than man. We cannot say
perhaps precisely why he is divine. But Tintoretto has made us feel that
he is. In other words, his treatment of the high theme chosen by him
has been adequate.
We must seek the Scuola di San Rocco for examples of Tintoretto's
liveliest imagination. Without ceasing to be Italian in his attention to
harmony and grace, he far exceeded the masters of his nation in the
power of suggesting what is weird, mysterious, upon the borderland of
the grotesque. And of this quality there are three remarkable instances
in the Scuola. No one but Tintoretto could have evoked the fiend in his
'Temptation of Christ.' It is an indescribable hermaphroditic genius, the
genius of carnal fascination, with outspread downy rose-plumed wings,
and flaming bracelets on the full but sinewy arms, who kneels and lifts
aloft great stones, smiling entreatingly to the sad, grey Christ seated
beneath a rugged pent-house of the desert. No one again but Tintoretto
could have dashed the hot lights of that fiery sunset in such quivering
flakes upon the golden flesh of Eve, half hidden among laurels, as she
stretches forth the fruit of the Fall to shrinking Adam. No one but
Tintoretto, till we come to Blake, could have imagined yonder Jonah,
summoned by the beck of God from the whale's belly. The monstrous
fish rolls over in the ocean, blowing portentous vapour from his
trump-shaped nostril. The prophet's beard descends upon his naked
breast in hoary ringlets to the girdle. He has forgotten the past peril of
the deep, although the whale's jaws yawn around him. Between him
and the outstretched finger of Jehovah calling him again to life, there
runs a spark of unseen spiritual electricity.
To comprehend Tintoretto's touch upon the pastoral idyll we must turn
our steps to San Giorgio again, and pace those meadows by the running
river in company with his Manna-Gatherers. Or we may seek the
Accademia, and notice how he here has varied the 'Temptation of
Adam by Eve,' choosing a less tragic motive of seduction than the one
so powerfully rendered at San Rocco. Or in the Ducal Palace we may
take our station, hour by hour, before the 'Marriage of Bacchus and
Ariadne.' It is well to leave the very highest achievements of art
untouched by criticism, undescribed. And in this picture we have the
most perfect of all modern attempts to realise an antique myth--more
perfect than Raphael's 'Galatea,' or Titian's 'Meeting of Bacchus with
Ariadne,' or Botticelli's 'Birth of Venus from the Sea.' It may suffice to
marvel at the slight effect which melodies so powerful and so direct as
these produce upon the ordinary public. Sitting, as is my wont, one
Sunday morning, opposite the 'Bacchus,' four Germans with a cicerone
sauntered by. The subject was explained to them. They waited an
appreciable space of time. Then the youngest opened his lips and spake:
'Bacchus war der Wein-Gott.' And they all moved heavily away. Bos
locutus est. 'Bacchus was the wine-god!' This, apparently, is what a
picture tells to one man. To another it presents divine harmonies,
perceptible indeed in nature, but here by the painter-poet for the first
time brought together and cadenced in a work of art. For another it is
perhaps the hieroglyph of pent-up passions and desired impossibilities.
For yet another it may only mean the unapproachable inimitable
triumph of consummate craft.
Tintoretto, to be rightly understood, must be sought all over Venice--in
the church as well as the Scuola di San Rocco; in the 'Temptation of S.
Anthony' at S. Trovaso no less than in the Temptations of Eve and
Christ; in the decorative pomp of the Sala del Senato, and in the
Paradisal vision of the Sala del Gran Consiglio. Yet, after all, there is
one of his most characteristic moods, to appreciate which fully we
return to the Madonna dell' Orto. I have called him 'the painter of
impossibilities.' At rare moments he rendered them possible by sheer
imaginative force. If we wish to realise this phase of his creative power,
and to measure our own subordination to his genius in its most
hazardous enterprise, we must spend much time in the choir of this
church. Lovers of art who mistrust this play of the audacious
fancy--aiming at sublimity in supersensual regions, sometimes attaining
to it by stupendous effort or authentic revelation, not seldom sinking to
the verge of bathos, and demanding the assistance of interpretative
sympathy in the spectator--such men will not take the point of view
required of them by Tintoretto in his boldest flights, in the 'Worship of
the Golden Calf' and in the 'Destruction of the World by Water.' It is for
them to ponder well the flying archangel with the scales of judgment in
his hand, and the seraph-charioted Jehovah enveloping Moses upon
Sinai in lightnings.
The gondola has had a long rest. Were Francesco but a little more
impatient, he might be wondering what had become of the padrone. I
bid him turn, and we are soon gliding into the Sacca della Misericordia.
This is a protected float, where the wood which comes from Cadore
and the hills of the Ampezzo is stored in spring. Yonder square white
house, standing out to sea, fronting Murano and the Alps, they call the
Oasa degli Spiriti. No one cares to inhabit it; for here, in old days, it
was the wont of the Venetians to lay their dead for a night's rest before
their final journey to the graveyard of S. Michele. So many generations
of dead folk had made that house their inn, that it is now no fitting
home for living men. San Michele is the island close before Murano,
where the Lombardi built one of their most romantically graceful
churches of pale Istrian stone, and where the Campo Santo has for
centuries received the dead into its oozy clay. The cemetery is at
present undergoing restoration. Its state of squalor and abandonment to
cynical disorder makes one feel how fitting for Italians would be the
custom of cremation. An island in the lagoons devoted to funeral pyres
is a solemn and ennobling conception. This graveyard, with its ruinous
walls, its mangy riot of unwholesome weeds, its corpses festering in
slime beneath neglected slabs in hollow chambers, and the mephitic
wash of poisoned waters that surround it, inspires the horror of disgust.
The morning has not lost its freshness. Antelao and Tofana, guarding
the vale above Cortina, show faint streaks of snow upon their amethyst.
Little clouds hang in the still autumn sky. There are men dredging for
shrimps and crabs through shoals uncovered by the ebb. Nothing can be
lovelier, more resting to eyes tired with pictures than this tranquil,
sunny expanse of the lagoon. As we round the point of the Bersaglio,
new landscapes of island and Alp and low-lying mainland move into
sight at every slow stroke of the oar. A luggage-train comes lumbering
along the railway bridge, puffing white smoke into the placid blue.
Then we strike down Cannaregio, and I muse upon processions of
kings and generals and noble strangers, entering Venice by this
water-path from Mestre, before the Austrians built their causeway for
the trains. Some of the rare scraps of fresco upon house fronts, still to
be seen in Venice, are left in Cannaregio. They are chiaroscuro
allegories in a bold bravura manner of the sixteenth century. From
these and from a few rosy fragments on the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the
Fabbriche Nuove, and precious fading figures in a certain courtyard
near San Stefano, we form some notion how Venice looked when all
her palaces were painted. Pictures by Gentile Bellini, Mansueti, and
Carpaccio help the fancy in this work of restoration. And here and there,
in back canals, we come across coloured sections of old buildings,
capped by true Venetian chimneys, which for a moment seem to realise
our dream.
A morning with Tintoretto might well be followed by a morning with
Carpaccio or Bellini. But space is wanting in these pages. Nor would it
suit the manner of this medley to hunt the Lombardi through palaces
and churches, pointing out their singularities of violet and yellow
panellings in marble, the dignity of their wide-opened arches, or the
delicacy of their shallow chiselled traceries in cream-white Istrian stone.
It is enough to indicate the goal of many a pleasant pilgrimage: warrior
angels of Vivarini and Basaiti hidden in a dark chapel of the Frari; Fra
Francesco's fantastic orchard of fruits and flowers in distant S.
Francesco della Vigna; the golden Gian Bellini in S. Zaccaria; Palma's
majestic S. Barbara in S. Maria Formosa; San Giobbe's wealth of
sculptured frieze and floral scroll; the Ponte di Paradiso, with its Gothic
arch; the painted plates in the Museo Civico; and palace after palace,
loved for some quaint piece of tracery, some moulding full of mediæval
symbolism, some fierce impossible Renaissance freak of fancy.
Bather than prolong this list, I will tell a story which drew me one day
past the Public Gardens to the metropolitan Church of Venice, San
Pietro di Castello. The novella is related by Bandello. It has, as will be
noticed, points of similarity to that of 'Romeo and Juliet.'
V.--A VENETIAN NOVELLA
At the time when Carpaccio and Gentile Bellini were painting those
handsome youths in tight jackets, parti-coloured hose, and little round
caps placed awry upon their shocks of well-combed hair, there lived in
Venice two noblemen, Messer Pietro and Messer Paolo, whose palaces
fronted each other on the Grand Canal. Messer Paolo was a widower,
with one married daughter, and an only son of twenty years or
thereabouts, named Gerardo. Messer Pietro's wife was still living; and
this couple had but one child, a daughter, called Elena, of exceeding
beauty, aged fourteen. Gerardo, as is the wont of gallants, was paying
his addresses to a certain lady; and nearly every day he had to cross the
Grand Canal in his gondola, and to pass beneath the house of Elena on
his way to visit his Dulcinea; for this lady lived some distance up a
little canal on which the western side of Messer Pietro's palace looked.
Now it so happened that at the very time when the story opens, Messer
Pietro's wife fell ill and died, and Elena was left alone at home with her
father and her old nurse. Across the little canal of which I spoke there
dwelt another nobleman, with four daughters, between the years of
seventeen and twenty-one. Messer Pietro, desiring to provide
amusement for poor little Elena, besought this gentleman that his
daughters might come on feast-days to play with her. For you must
know that, except on festivals of the Church, the custom of Venice
required that gentlewomen should remain closely shut within the
private apartments of their dwellings. His request was readily granted;
and on the next feast-day the five girls began to play at ball together for
forfeits in the great saloon, which opened with its row of Gothic arches
and balustraded balcony upon the Grand Canal. The four sisters,
meanwhile, had other thoughts than for the game. One or other of them,
and sometimes three together, would let the ball drop, and run to the
balcony to gaze upon their gallants, passing up and down in gondolas
below; and then they would drop flowers or ribands for tokens. Which
negligence of theirs annoyed Elena much; for she thought only of the
game. Wherefore she scolded them in childish wise, and one of them
made answer, 'Elena, if you only knew how pleasant it is to play as we
are playing on this balcony, you would not care so much for ball and
forfeits!'
On one of those feast-days the four sisters were prevented from keeping
their little friend company. Elena, with nothing to do, and feeling
melancholy, leaned upon the window-sill which overlooked the narrow
canal. And it chanced that just then Gerardo, on his way to Dulcinea,
went by; and Elena looked down at him, as she had seen those sisters
look at passers-by. Gerardo caught her eye, and glances passed between
them, and Gerardo's gondolier, bending from the poop, said to his
master, 'O master! methinks that gentle maiden is better worth your
wooing than Dulcinea.' Gerardo pretended to pay no heed to these
words; but after rowing a little way, he bade the man turn, and they
went slowly back beneath the window. This time Elena, thinking to
play the game which her four friends had played, took from her hair a
clove carnation and let it fall close to Gerardo on the cushion of the
gondola. He raised the flower and put it to his lips, acknowledging the
courtesy with a grave bow. But the perfume of the clove and the beauty
of Elena in that moment took possession of his heart together, and
straightway he forgot Dulcinea.
As yet he knew not who Elena was. Nor is this wonderful; for the
daughters of Venetian nobles were but rarely seen or spoken of. But the
thought of her haunted him awake and sleeping; and every feast-day,
when there was the chance of seeing her, he rowed his gondola beneath
her windows. And there she appeared to him in company with her four
friends; the five girls clustering together like sister roses beneath the
pointed windows of the Gothic balcony. Elena, on her side, had no
thought of love; for of love she had heard no one speak. But she took
pleasure in the game those friends had taught her, of leaning from the
balcony to watch Gerardo. He meanwhile grew love-sick and impatient,
wondering how he might declare his passion. Until one day it happened
that, talking through a lane or calle which skirted Messer Pietro'a
palace, he caught sight of Elena's nurse, who was knocking at the door,
returning from some shopping she had made. This nurse had been his
own nurse in childhood; therefore he remembered her, and cried aloud,
'Nurse, Nurse!' But the old woman did not hear him, and passed into
the house and shut the door behind her. Whereupon Gerardo, greatly
moved, still called to her, and when he reached the door, began to
knock upon it violently. And whether it was the agitation of finding
himself at last so near the wish of his heart, or whether the pains of
waiting for his love had weakened him, I know not; but, while he
knocked, his senses left him, and he fell fainting in the doorway. Then
the nurse recognised the youth to whom she had given suck, and
brought him into the courtyard by the help of handmaidens, and Elena
came down and gazed upon him. The house was now full of bustle, and
Messer Pietro heard the noise, and seeing the son of his neighbour in so
piteous a plight, he caused Gerardo to be laid upon a bed. But for all
they could do with him, he recovered not from his swoon. And after a
while force was that they should place him in a gondola and ferry him
across to his father's house. The nurse went with him, and informed
Messer Paolo of what had happened. Doctors were sent for, and the
whole family gathered round Gerardo's bed. After a while he revived a
little; and thinking himself still upon the doorstep of Pietro's palace,
called again, 'Nurse, Nurse!' She was near at hand, and would have
spoken to him. But while he summoned his senses to his aid, he
became gradually aware of his own kinsfolk and dissembled the secret
of his grief. They beholding him in better cheer, departed on their
several ways, and the nurse still sat alone beside him. Then he
explained to her what he had at heart, and how he was in love with a
maiden whom he had seen on feast-days in the house of Messer Pietro.
But still he knew not Elena's name; and she, thinking it impossible that
such a child had inspired this passion, began to marvel which of the
four sisters it was Gerardo loved. Then they appointed the next Sunday,
when all the five girls should be together, for Gerardo by some sign, as
he passed beneath the window, to make known to the old nurse his
lady.
Elena, meanwhile, who had watched Gerardo lying still and pale in
swoon beneath her on the pavement of the palace, felt the stirring of a
new unknown emotion in her soul. When Sunday came, she devised
excuses for keeping her four friends away, bethinking her that she
might see him once again alone, and not betray the agitation which she
dreaded. This ill suited the schemes of the nurse, who nevertheless was
forced to be content. But after dinner, seeing how restless was the girl,
and how she came and went, and ran a thousand times to the balcony,
the nurse began to wonder whether Elena herself were not in love with
some one. So she feigned to sleep, but placed herself within sight of the
window. And soon Gerardo came by in his gondola; and Elena, who
was prepared, threw to him her nosegay. The watchful nurse had risen,
and peeping behind the girl's shoulder, saw at a glance how matters
stood. Thereupon she began to scold her charge, and say, 'Is this a fair
and comely thing, to stand all day at balconies and throw flowers at
passers-by? Woe to you if your father should come to know of this! He
would make you wish yourself among the dead!' Elena, sore troubled at
her nurse's rebuke, turned and threw her arms about her neck, and
called her 'Nanna!' as the wont is of Venetian children. Then she told
the old woman how she had learned that game from the four sisters,
and how she thought it was not different, but far more pleasant, than
the game of forfeits; whereupon her nurse spoke gravely, explaining
what love is, and how that love should lead to marriage, and bidding
her search her own heart if haply she could choose Gerardo for her
husband. There was no reason, as she knew, why Messer Paolo's son
should not mate with Messer Pietro's daughter. But being a romantic
creature, as many women are, she resolved to bring the match about in
secret.
Elena took little time to reflect, but told her nurse that she was willing,
if Gerardo willed it too, to have him for her husband. Then went the
nurse and made the young man know how matters stood, and arranged
with him a day, when Messer Pietro should be in the Council of the
Pregadi, and the servants of the palace otherwise employed, for him to
come and meet his Elena. A glad man was Gerardo, nor did he wait to
think how better it would be to ask the hand of Elena in marriage from
her father. But when the day arrived, he sought the nurse, and she took
him to a chamber in the palace, where there stood an image of the
Blessed Virgin. Elena was there, pale and timid; and when the lovers
clasped hands, neither found many words to say. But the nurse bade
them take heart, and leading them before Our Lady, joined their hands,
and made Gerardo place his ring on his bride's finger. After this fashion
were Gerardo and Elena wedded. And for some while, by the assistance
of the nurse, they dwelt together in much love and solace, meeting
often as occasion offered.
Messer Paolo, who knew nothing of these things, took thought
meanwhile for his son's career. It was the season when the Signiory of
Venice sends a fleet of galleys to Beirut with merchandise; and the
noblemen may bid for the hiring of a ship, and charge it with wares,
and send whomsoever they list as factor in their interest. One of these
galleys, then, Messer Paolo engaged, and told his son that he had
appointed him to journey with it and increase their wealth. 'On thy
return, my son,' he said, 'we will bethink us of a wife for thee.' Gerardo,
when he heard these words, was sore troubled, and first he told his
father roundly that he would not go, and flew off in the twilight to pour
out his perplexities to Elena. But she, who was prudent and of gentle
soul, besought him to obey his father in this thing, to the end, moreover,
that, having done his will and increased his wealth, he might afterwards
unfold the story of their secret marriage. To these good counsels,
though loth, Gerardo consented. His father was overjoyed at his son's
repentance. The galley was straightway laden with merchandise, and
Gerardo set forth on his voyage.
The trip to Beirut and back lasted usually six months or at the most
seven. Now when Gerardo had been some six months away, Messer
Pietro, noticing how fair his daughter was, and how she had grown into
womanhood, looked about him for a husband for her. When he had
found a youth suitable in birth and wealth and years, he called for Elena,
and told her that the day had been appointed for her marriage. She, alas!
knew not what to answer. She feared to tell her father that she was
already married, for she knew not whether this would please Gerardo.
For the same reason she dreaded to throw herself upon the kindness of
Messer Paolo. Nor was her nurse of any help in counsel; for the old
woman repented her of what she had done, and had good cause to
believe that, even if the marriage with Gerardo were accepted by the
two fathers, they would punish her for her own part in the affair.
Therefore she bade Elena wait on fortune, and hinted to her that, if the
worst came to the worst, no one need know she had been wedded with
the ring to Gerardo. Such weddings, you must know, were binding; but
till they had been blessed by the Church, they had not taken the force of
a religious sacrament. And this is still the case in Italy among the
common folk, who will say of a man, 'Si, è ammogliato; ma il
matrimonio non è stato benedetto.' 'Yes, he has taken a wife, but the
marriage has not yet been blessed.'
So the days flew by in doubt and sore distress for Elena. Then on the
night before her wedding, she felt that she could bear this life no longer.
But having no poison, and being afraid to pierce her bosom with a knife,
she lay down on her bed alone, and tried to die by holding in her breath.
A mortal swoon came over her; her senses fled; the life in her remained
suspended. And when her nurse came next morning to call her, she
found poor Elena cold as a corpse. Messer Pietro and all the household
rushed, at the nurse's cries, into the room, and they all saw Elena
stretched dead upon her bed undressed. Physicians were called, who
made theories to explain the cause of death. But all believed that she
was really dead, beyond all help of art or medicine. Nothing remained
but to carry her to church for burial instead of marriage. Therefore, that
very evening, a funeral procession was formed, which moved by
torchlight up the Grand Canal, along the Riva, past the blank walls of
the Arsenal, to the Campo before San Pietro in Castello. Elena lay
beneath the black felze in one gondola, with a priest beside her praying,
and other boats followed bearing mourners. Then they laid her in a
marble chest outside the church, and all departed, still with torches
burning, to their homes.
Now it so fell out that upon that very evening Gerardo's galley had
returned from Syria, and was anchoring within the port of Lido, which
looks across to the island of Castello. It was the gentle custom of
Venice at that time that, when a ship arrived from sea, the friends of
those on board at once came out to welcome them, and take and give
the news. Therefore many noble youths and other citizens were on the
deck of Gerardo's galley, making merry with him over the safe conduct
of his voyage. Of one of these he asked, 'Whose is yonder funeral
procession returning from San Pietro?' The young man made answer,
'Alas, for poor Elena, Messer Pietro's daughter! She should have been
married this day. But death took her, and to-night they buried her in the
marble monument outside the church.' A woeful man was Gerardo,
hearing suddenly this news, and knowing what his dear wife must have
suffered ere she died. Yet he restrained himself, daring not to disclose
his anguish, and waited till his friends had left the galley. Then he
called to him the captain of the oarsmen, who was his friend, and
unfolded to him all the story of his love and sorrow, and said that he
must go that night and see his wife once more, if even he should have
to break her tomb. The captain tried to dissuade him, but in vain.
Seeing him so obstinate, he resolved not to desert Gerardo. The two
men took one of the galley's boats, and rowed together toward San
Pietro. It was past midnight when they reached the Campo and broke
the marble sepulchre asunder. Pushing back its lid, Gerardo descended
into the grave and abandoned himself upon the body of his Elena. One
who had seen them at that moment could not well have said which of
the two was dead and which was living--Elena or her husband.
Meantime the captain of the oarsmen, fearing lest the watch (set by the
Masters of the Night to keep the peace of Venice) might arrive, was
calling on Gerardo to come back. Gerardo heeded him no whit. But at
the last, compelled by his entreaties, and as it were astonied, he arose,
bearing his wife's corpse in his arms, and carried her clasped against his
bosom to the boat, and laid her therein, and sat down by her side and
kissed her frequently, and suffered not his friend's remonstrances.
Force was for the captain, having brought himself into this scrape, that
he should now seek refuge by the nearest way from justice. Therefore
he hoved gently from the bank, and plied his oar, and brought the
gondola apace into the open waters. Gerardo still clasped Elena, dying
husband by dead wife. But the sea-breeze freshened towards daybreak;
and the captain, looking down upon that pair, and bringing to their
faces the light of his boat's lantern, judged their case not desperate at all.
On Elena's cheek there was a flush of life less deadly even than the
pallor of Gerardo's forehead. Thereupon the good man called aloud,
and Gerardo started from his grief; and both together they chafed the
hands and feet of Elena; and, the sea-breeze aiding with its saltness,
they awoke in her the spark of life.
Dimly burned the spark. But Gerardo, being aware of it, became a man
again. Then, having taken counsel with the captain, both resolved to
bear her to that brave man's mother's house. A bed was soon made
ready, and food was brought; and after due time, she lifted up her face
and knew Gerardo. The peril of the grave was past, but thought had
now to be taken for the future. Therefore Gerardo, leaving his wife to
the captain's mother, rowed back to the galley and prepared to meet his
father. With good store of merchandise and with great gains from his
traffic, he arrived in that old palace on the Grand Canal. Then having
opened to Messer Paolo the matters of his journey, and shown him how
he had fared, and set before him tables of disbursements and receipts,
he seized the moment of his father's gladness. 'Father,' he said, and as
he spoke he knelt upon his knees, 'Father, I bring you not good store of
merchandise and bags of gold alone; I bring you also a wedded wife,
whom I have saved this night from death.' And when the old man's
surprise was quieted, he told him the whole story. Now Messer Paolo,
desiring no better than that his son should wed the heiress of his
neighbour, and knowing well that Messer Pietro would make great joy
receiving back his daughter from the grave, bade Gerardo in haste take
rich apparel and clothe Elena therewith, and fetch her home. These
things were swiftly done; and after evenfall Messer Pietro was bidden
to grave business in his neighbour's palace. With heavy heart he came,
from a house of mourning to a house of gladness. But there, at the
banquet-table's head he saw his dead child Elena alive, and at her side a
husband. And when the whole truth had been declared, he not only
kissed and embraced the pair who knelt before him, but of his goodness
forgave the nurse, who in her turn came trembling to his feet. Then fell
there joy and bliss in overmeasure that night upon both palaces of the
Canal Grande. And with the morrow the Church blessed the spousals
which long since had been on both sides vowed and consummated.
VI.--ON THE LAGOONS
The mornings are spent in study, sometimes among pictures,
sometimes in the Marcian Library, or again in those vast convent
chambers of the Frari, where the archives of Venice load innumerable
shelves. The afternoons invite us to a further flight upon the water.
Both sandolo and gondola await our choice, and we may sail or row,
according as the wind and inclination tempt us.
Yonder lies San Lazzaro, with the neat red buildings of the Armenian
convent. The last oleander blossoms shine rosy pink above its walls
against the pure blue sky as we glide into the little harbour. Boats piled
with coal-black grapes block the landing-place, for the Padri are
gathering their vintage from the Lido, and their presses run with new
wine. Eustace and I have not come to revive memories of Byron--that
curious patron saint of the Armenian colony--or to inspect the
printing-press, which issues books of little value for our studies. It is
enough to pace the terrace, and linger half an hour beneath the low
broad arches of the alleys pleached with vines, through which the
domes and towers of Venice rise more beautiful by distance.
Malamocco lies considerably farther, and needs a full hour of stout
rowing to reach it. Alighting there, we cross the narrow strip of land,
and find ourselves upon the huge sea-wall--block piled on block--of
Istrian stone in tiers and ranks, with cunning breathing-places for the
waves to wreak their fury on and foam their force away in fretful waste.
The very existence of Venice may be said to depend sometimes on
these murazzi, which were finished at an immense cost by the Republic
in the days of its decadence. The enormous monoliths which compose
them had to be brought across the Adriatic in sailing vessels. Of all the
Lidi, that of Malamocco is the weakest; and here, if anywhere, the sea
might effect an entrance into the lagoon. Our gondoliers told us of
some places where the murazzi were broken in a gale, or sciroccale, not
very long ago. Lying awake in Venice, when the wind blows hard, one
hears the sea thundering upon its sandy barrier, and blesses God for the
murazzi. On such a night it happened once to me to dream a dream of
Venice overwhelmed by water. I saw the billows roll across the smooth
lagoon like a gigantic Eager. The Ducal Palace crumbled, and San
Marco's domes went down. The Campanile rocked and shivered like a
reed. And all along the Grand Canal the palaces swayed helpless,
tottering to their fall, while boats piled high with men and women
strove to stem the tide, and save themselves from those impending
ruins. It was a mad dream, born of the sea's roar and Tintoretto's
painting. But this afternoon no such visions are suggested. The sea
sleeps, and in the moist autumn air we break tall branches of the seeded
yellowing samphire from hollows of the rocks, and bear them
homeward in a wayward bouquet mixed with cobs of Indian-corn.
Fusina is another point for these excursions. It lies at the mouth of the
Canal di Brenta, where the mainland ends in marsh and meadows,
intersected by broad renes. In spring the ditches bloom with
fleurs-de-lys; in autumn they take sober colouring from lilac daisies
and the delicate sea-lavender. Scores of tiny plants are turning scarlet
on the brown moist earth; and when the sun goes down behind the
Euganean hills, his crimson canopy of cloud, reflected on these
shallows, muddy shoals, and wilderness of matted weeds, converts the
common earth into a fairyland of fabulous dyes. Purple, violet, and rose
are spread around us. In front stretches the lagoon, tinted with a pale
light from the east, and beyond this pallid mirror shines Venice--a long
low broken line, touched with the softest roseate flush. Ere we reach
the Giudecca on our homeward way, sunset has faded. The western
skies have clad themselves in green, barred with dark fire-rimmed
clouds. The Euganean hills stand like stupendous pyramids, Egyptian,
solemn, against a lemon space on the horizon. The far reaches of the
lagoons, the Alps, and islands assume those tones of glowing lilac
which are the supreme beauty of Venetian evening. Then, at last, we
see the first lamps glitter on the Zattere. The quiet of the night has
come.
Words cannot be formed to express the endless varieties of Venetian
sunset. The most magnificent follow after wet stormy days, when the
west breaks suddenly into a labyrinth of fire, when chasms of clear
turquoise heavens emerge, and horns of flame are flashed to the zenith,
and unexpected splendours scale the fretted clouds, step over step,
stealing along the purple caverns till the whole dome throbs. Or, again,
after a fair day, a change of weather approaches, and high, infinitely
high, the skies are woven over with a web of half-transparent
cirrus-clouds. These in the afterglow blush crimson, and through their
rifts the depth of heaven is of a hard and gemlike blue, and all the water
turns to rose beneath them. I remember one such evening on the way
back from Torcello. We were well out at sea between Mazzorbo and
Murano. The ruddy arches overhead were reflected without interruption
in the waveless ruddy lake below. Our black boat was the only dark
spot in this sphere of splendour. We seemed to hang suspended; and
such as this, I fancied, must be the feeling of an insect caught in the
heart of a fiery-petalled rose. Yet not these melodramatic sunsets alone
are beautiful. Even more exquisite, perhaps, are the lagoons, painted in
monochrome of greys, with just one touch of pink upon a western
cloud, scattered in ripples here and there on the waves below,
reminding us that day has passed and evening come. And beautiful
again are the calm settings of fair weather, when sea and sky alike are
cheerful, and the topmost blades of the lagoon grass, peeping from the
shallows, glance like emeralds upon the surface. There is no deep
stirring of the spirit in a symphony of light and colour; but purity, peace,
and freshness make their way into our hearts.
VII.--AT THE LIDO
Of all these afternoon excursions, that to the Lido is most frequent. It
has two points for approach. The more distant is the little station of San
Nicoletto, at the mouth of the Porto. With an ebb-tide, the water of the
lagoon runs past the mulberry gardens of this hamlet like a river. There
is here a grove of acacia-trees, shadowy and dreamy, above deep grass,
which even an Italian summer does not wither. The Riva is fairly broad,
forming a promenade, where one may conjure up the personages of a
century ago. For San Nicoletto used to be a fashionable resort before
the other points of Lido had been occupied by pleasure-seekers. An
artist even now will select its old-world quiet, leafy shade, and prospect
through the islands of Vignole and Sant' Erasmo to snow-touched peaks
of Antelao and Tofana, rather than the glare and bustle and extended
view of Venice which its rival Sant' Elisabetta offers.
But when we want a plunge into the Adriatic, or a stroll along smooth
sands, or a breath of genuine sea-breeze, or a handful of horned poppies
from the dunes, or a lazy half-hour's contemplation of a limitless
horizon flecked with russet sails, then we seek Sant' Elisabetta. Our
boat is left at the landing-place. We saunter across the island and back
again. Antonio and Francesco wait and order wine, which we drink
with them in the shade of the little osteria's wall.
A certain afternoon in May I well remember, for this visit to the Lido
was marked by one of those apparitions which are as rare as they are
welcome to the artist's soul. I have always held that in our modern life
the only real equivalent for the antique mythopoeic sense--that sense
which enabled the Hellenic race to figure for themselves the powers of
earth and air, streams and forests, and the presiding genii of places,
under the forms of living human beings, is supplied by the appearance
at some felicitous moment of a man or woman who impersonates for
our imagination the essence of the beauty that environs us. It seems, at
such a fortunate moment, as though we had been waiting for this
revelation, although perchance the want of it had not been previously
felt. Our sensations and perceptions test themselves at the touchstone of
this living individuality. The keynote of the whole music dimly
sounding in our ears is struck. A melody emerges, clear in form and
excellent in rhythm. The landscapes we have painted on our brain, no
longer lack their central figure. The life proper to the complex
conditions we have studied is discovered, and every detail, judged by
this standard of vitality, falls into its right relations.
I had been musing long that day and earnestly upon the mystery of the
lagoons, their opaline transparencies of air and water, their fretful
risings and sudden subsidence into calm, the treacherousness of their
shoals, the sparkle and the splendour of their sunlight. I had asked
myself how would a Greek sculptor have personified the elemental
deity of these salt-water lakes, so different in quality from the Ægean or
Ionian sea? What would he find distinctive of their spirit? The Tritons
of these shallows must be of other form and lineage than the
fierce-eyed youth who blows his conch upon the curled crest of a wave,
crying aloud to his comrades, as he bears the nymph away to caverns
where the billows plunge in tideless instability.
We had picked up shells and looked for sea-horses on the Adriatic
shore. Then we returned to give our boatmen wine beneath the
vine-clad pergola. Four other men were there, drinking, and eating
from a dish of fried fish set upon the coarse white linen cloth. Two of
them soon rose and went away. Of the two who stayed, one was a large,
middle-aged man; the other was still young. He was tall and sinewy,
but slender, for these Venetians are rarely massive in their strength.
Each limb is equally developed by the exercise of rowing upright,
bending all the muscles to their stroke. Their bodies are elastically
supple, with free sway from the hips and a mercurial poise upon the
ankle. Stefano showed these qualities almost in exaggeration. The type
in him was refined to its artistic perfection. Moreover, he was rarely in
repose, but moved with a singular brusque grace. A black
broad-brimmed hat was thrown back upon his matted zazzera of dark
hair tipped with dusky brown. This shock of hair, cut in flakes, and
falling wilfully, reminded me of the lagoon grass when it darkens in
autumn upon uncovered shoals, and sunset gilds its sombre edges.
Fiery grey eyes beneath it gazed intensely, with compulsive effluence
of electricity. It was the wild glance of a Triton. Short blonde
moustache, dazzling teeth, skin bronzed, but showing white and
healthful through open front and sleeves of lilac shirt. The dashing
sparkle of this animate splendour, who looked to me as though the
sea-waves and the sun had made him in some hour of secret and
unquiet rapture, was somehow emphasised by a curious dint dividing
his square chin--a cleft that harmonised with smile on lip and steady
flame in eyes. I hardly know what effect it would have upon a reader to
compare eyes to opals. Yet Stefano's eyes, as they met mine, had the
vitreous intensity of opals, as though the colour of Venetian waters
were vitalised in them. This noticeable being had a rough, hoarse voice,
which, to develop the parallel with a sea-god, might have screamed in
storm or whispered raucous messages from crests of tossing billows.
I felt, as I looked, that here, for me at least, the mythopoem of the
lagoons was humanised; the spirit of the saltwater lakes had appeared
to me; the final touch of life emergent from nature had been given. I
was satisfied; for I had seen a poem.
Then we rose, and wandered through the Jews' cemetery. It is a quiet
place, where the flat grave-stones, inscribed in Hebrew and Italian, lie
deep in Lido sand, waved over with wild grass and poppies. I would
fain believe that no neglect, but rather the fashion of this folk, had left
the monuments of generations to be thus resumed by nature. Yet,
knowing nothing of the history of this burial-ground, I dare not affirm
so much. There is one outlying piece of the cemetery which seems to
contradict my charitable interpretation. It is not far from San Nicoletto.
No enclosure marks it from the unconsecrated dunes. Acacia-trees
sprout amid the monuments, and break the tablets with their thorny
shoots upthrusting from the soil. Where patriarchs and rabbis sleep for
centuries, the fishers of the sea now wander, and defile these
habitations of the dead:
Corruption most abhorred Mingling itself with their renownèd ashes.
Some of the grave-stones have been used to fence the towing-path; and
one I saw, well carved with letters legible of Hebrew on fair Istrian
marble, which roofed an open drain leading from the stable of a
Christian dog.
VIII.--A VENETIAN RESTAURANT
At the end of a long glorious day, unhappy is that mortal whom the
Hermes of a cosmopolitan hotel, white-chokered and white-waistcoated,
marshals to the Hades of the table-d'hôte. The world has often been
compared to an inn; but on my way down to this common meal I have,
not unfrequently, felt fain to reverse the simile. From their separate
stations, at the appointed hour, the guests like ghosts flit to a gloomy
gas-lit chamber. They are of various speech and race, preoccupied with
divers interests and cares. Necessity and the waiter drive them all to a
sepulchral syssition, whereof the cook too frequently deserves that old
Greek comic epithet--[Greek: hadou mageiros]--cook of the Inferno.
And just as we are told that in Charon's boat we shall not be allowed to
pick our society, so here we must accept what fellowship the fates
provide. An English spinster retailing paradoxes culled to-day from
Ruskin's handbooks; an American citizen describing his jaunt in a
gondóla from the railway station; a German shopkeeper descanting in
one breath on Baur's Bock and the beauties of the Marcusplatz; an
intelligent æsthete bent on working into clearness his own views of
Carpaccio's genius: all these in turn, or all together, must be suffered
gladly through well-nigh two long hours. Uncomforted in soul we rise
from the expensive banquet; and how often rise from it unfed!
Far other be the doom of my own friends--of pious bards and genial
companions, lovers of natural and lovely things! Nor for these do I
desire a seat at Florian's marble tables, or a perch in Quadri's window,
though the former supply dainty food, and the latter command a
bird's-eye view of the Piazza. Rather would I lead them to a certain
humble tavern on the Zattere. It is a quaint, low-built, unpretending
little place, near a bridge, with a garden hard by which sends a cataract
of honeysuckles sunward over a too-jealous wall. In front lies a
Mediterranean steamer, which all day long has been discharging cargo.
Gazing westward up Giudecca, masts and funnels bar the sunset and
the Paduan hills; and from a little front room of the trattoria the view is
so marine that one keeps fancying oneself in some ship's cabin.
Sea-captains sit and smoke beside their glass of grog in the pavilion
and the caffé. But we do not seek their company at dinner-time. Our
way lies under yonder arch, and up the narrow alley into a paved court.
Here are oleanders in pots, and plants of Japanese spindle-wood in tubs;
and from the walls beneath the window hang cages of all sorts of
birds--a talking parrot, a whistling blackbird, goldfinches, canaries,
linnets. Athos, the fat dog, who goes to market daily in a barchetta with
his master, snuffs around. 'Where are Porthos and Aramis, my friend?'
Athos does not take the joke; he only wags his stump of tail and pokes
his nose into my hand. What a Tartufe's nose it is! Its bridge displays
the full parade of leather-bound brass-nailed muzzle. But beneath, this
muzzle is a patent sham. The frame does not even pretend to close on
Athos' jaw, and the wise dog wears it like a decoration. A little farther
we meet that ancient grey cat, who has no discoverable name, but is
famous for the sprightliness and grace with which she bears her
eighteen years. Not far from the cat one is sure to find Carlo--the
bird-like, bright-faced, close-cropped Venetian urchin, whose duty it is
to trot backwards and forwards between the cellar and the dining-tables.
At the end of the court we walk into the kitchen, where the
black-capped little padrone and the gigantic white-capped chef are in
close consultation. Here we have the privilege of inspecting the
larder--fish of various sorts, meat, vegetables, several kinds of birds,
pigeons, tordi, beccafichi, geese, wild ducks, chickens, woodcock, &c.,
according to the season. We select our dinner, and retire to eat it either
in the court among the birds beneath the vines, or in the low dark room
which occupies one side of it. Artists of many nationalities and divers
ages frequent this house; and the talk arising from the several little
tables, turns upon points of interest and beauty in the life and landscape
of Venice. There can be no difference of opinion about the excellence
of the cuisine, or about the reasonable charges of this trattoria. A soup
of lentils, followed by boiled turbot or fried soles, beefsteak or mutton
cutlets, tordi or beccafichi, with a salad, the whole enlivened with good
red wine or Florio's Sicilian Marsala from the cask, costs about four
francs. Gas is unknown in the establishment. There is no noise, no
bustle, no brutality of waiters, no ahurissement of tourists. And when
dinner is done, we can sit awhile over our cigarette and coffee, talking
until the night invites us to a stroll along the Zattere or a giro in the
gondola.
IX.--NIGHT IN VENICE
Night in Venice! Night is nowhere else so wonderful, unless it be in
winter among the high Alps. But the nights of Venice and the nights of
the mountains are too different in kind to be compared.
There is the ever-recurring miracle of the full moon rising, before day
is dead, behind San Giorgio, spreading a path of gold on the lagoon
which black boats traverse with the glow-worm lamp upon their prow;
ascending the cloudless sky and silvering the domes of the Salute;
pouring vitreous sheen upon the red lights of the Piazzetta; flooding the
Grand Canal, and lifting the Rialto higher in ethereal whiteness;
piercing but penetrating not the murky labyrinth of rio linked with rio,
through which we wind in light and shadow, to reach once more the
level glories and the luminous expanse of heaven beyond the
Misericordia.
This is the melodrama of Venetian moonlight; and if a single
impression of the night has to be retained from one visit to Venice,
those are fortunate who chance upon a full moon of fair weather. Yet I
know not whether some quieter and soberer effects are not more
thrilling. To-night, for example, the waning moon will rise late through
veils of scirocco. Over the bridges of San Cristoforo and San Gregorio,
through the deserted Calle di Mezzo, my friend and I walk in darkness,
pass the marble basements of the Salute, and push our way along its
Riva to the point of the Dogana. We are out at sea alone, between the
Canalozzo and the Giudecca. A moist wind ruffles the water and cools
our forehead. It is so dark that we can only see San Giorgio by the light
reflected on it from the Piazzetta. The same light climbs the Campanile
of S. Mark, and shows the golden angel in a mystery of gloom. The
only noise that reaches us is a confused hum from the Piazza. Sitting
and musing there, the blackness of the water whispers in our ears a tale
of death. And now we hear a plash of oars, and gliding through the
darkness comes a single boat. One man leaps upon the landing-place
without a word and disappears. There is another wrapped in a military
cloak asleep. I see his face beneath me, pale and quiet. The barcaruolo
turns the point in silence. From the darkness they came; into the
darkness they have gone. It is only an ordinary incident of coastguard
service. But the spirit of the night has made a poem of it.
Even tempestuous and rainy weather, though melancholy enough, is
never sordid here. There is no noise from carriage traffic in Venice, and
the sea-wind preserves the purity and transparency of the atmosphere. It
had been raining all day, but at evening came a partial clearing. I went
down to the Molo, where the large reach of the lagoon was all
moon-silvered, and San Giorgio Maggiore dark against the bluish sky,
and Santa Maria della Salute domed with moon-irradiated pearl, and
the wet slabs of the Riva shimmering in moonlight, the whole misty
sky, with its clouds and stellar spaces, drenched in moonlight, nothing
but moonlight sensible except the tawny flare of gas-lamps and the
orange lights of gondolas afloat upon the waters. On such a night the
very spirit of Venice is abroad. We feel why she is called Bride of the
Sea.
Take yet another night. There had been a representation of Verdi's
'Forza del Destino' at the Teatro Malibran. After midnight we walked
homeward through the Merceria, crossed the Piazza, and dived into the
narrow calle which leads to the traghetto of the Salute. It was a warm
moist starless night, and there seemed no air to breathe in those narrow
alleys. The gondolier was half asleep. Eustace called him as we jumped
into his boat, and rang our soldi on the gunwale. Then he arose and
turned the ferro round, and stood across towards the Salute. Silently,
insensibly, from the oppression of confinement in the airless streets to
the liberty and immensity of the water and the night we passed. It was
but two minutes ere we touched the shore and said good-night, and
went our way and left the ferryman. But in that brief passage he had
opened our souls to everlasting things--the freshness, and the darkness,
and the kindness of the brooding, all-enfolding night above the sea.
*****
THE GONDOLIER'S WEDDING
The night before the wedding we had a supper-party in my rooms. We
were twelve in all. My friend Eustace brought his gondolier Antonio
with fair-haired, dark-eyed wife, and little Attilio, their eldest child. My
own gondolier, Francesco, came with his wife and two children. Then
there was the handsome, languid Luigi, who, in his best clothes, or out
of them, is fit for any drawing-room. Two gondoliers, in dark blue
shirts, completed the list of guests, if we exclude the maid Catina, who
came and went about the table, laughing and joining in the songs, and
sitting down at intervals to take her share of wine. The big room
looking across the garden to the Grand Canal had been prepared for
supper; and the company were to be received in the smaller, which has
a fine open space in front of it to southwards. But as the guests arrived,
they seemed to find the kitchen and the cooking that was going on quite
irresistible. Catina, it seems, had lost her head with so many
cuttlefishes, orai, cakes, and fowls, and cutlets to reduce to order.
There was, therefore, a great bustle below stairs; and I could hear
plainly that all my guests were lending their making, or their marring,
hands to the preparation of the supper. That the company should cook
their own food on the way to the dining-room, seemed a quite novel
arrangement, but one that promised well for their contentment with the
banquet. Nobody could be dissatisfied with what was everybody's
affair.
When seven o'clock struck, Eustace and I, who had been entertaining
the children in their mothers' absence, heard the sound of steps upon
the stairs. The guests arrived, bringing their own risotto with them.
Welcome was short, if hearty. We sat down in carefully appointed
order, and fell into such conversation as the quarter of San Vio and our
several interests supplied. From time to time one of the matrons left the
table and descended to the kitchen, when a finishing stroke was needed
for roast pullet or stewed veal. The excuses they made their host for
supposed failure in the dishes, lent a certain grace and comic charm to
the commonplace of festivity. The entertainment was theirs as much as
mine; and they all seemed to enjoy what took the form by degrees of
curiously complicated hospitality. I do not think a well-ordered supper
at any trattoria, such as at first suggested itself to my imagination,
would have given any of us an equal pleasure or an equal sense of
freedom. The three children had become the guests of the whole party.
Little Attilio, propped upon an air-cushion, which puzzled him
exceedingly, ate through his supper and drank his wine with solid
satisfaction, opening the large brown eyes beneath those tufts of
clustering fair hair which promise much beauty for him in his manhood.
Francesco's boy, who is older and begins to know the world, sat with a
semi-suppressed grin upon his face, as though the humour of the
situation was not wholly hidden from him. Little Teresa, too, was
happy, except when her mother, a severe Pomona, with enormous
earrings and splendid fazzoletto of crimson and orange dyes, pounced
down upon her for some supposed infraction of good manners--creanza,
as they vividly express it here. Only Luigi looked a trifle bored. But
Luigi has been a soldier, and has now attained the supercilious
superiority of young-manhood, which smokes its cigar of an evening in
the piazza and knows the merits of the different cafés. The great
business of the evening began when the eating was over, and the
decanters filled with new wine of Mirano circulated freely. The four
best singers of the party drew together; and the rest prepared
themselves to make suggestions, hum tunes, and join with fitful effect
in choruses. Antonio, who is a powerful young fellow, with bronzed
cheeks and a perfect tempest of coal-black hair in flakes upon his
forehead, has a most extraordinary soprano--sound as a bell, strong as a
trumpet, well trained, and true to the least shade in intonation. Piero,
whose rugged Neptunian features, sea-wrinkled, tell of a rough
water-life, boasts a bass of resonant, almost pathetic quality. Francesco
has a mezzo voce, which might, by a stretch of politeness, be called
baritone. Piero's comrade, whose name concerns us not, has another of
these nondescript voices. They sat together with their glasses and cigars
before them, sketching part-songs in outline, striking the keynote--now
higher and now lower--till they saw their subject well in view. Then
they burst into full singing, Antonio leading with a metal note that
thrilled one's ears, but still was musical. Complicated contrapuntal
pieces, such as we should call madrigals, with ever-recurring refrains of
'Venezia, gemma Triatica, sposa del mar,' descending probably from
ancient days, followed each other in quick succession. Barcaroles,
serenades, love-songs, and invitations to the water were interwoven for
relief. One of these romantic pieces had a beautiful burden, 'Dormi, o
bella, o fingi di dormir,' of which the melody was fully worthy. But the
most successful of all the tunes were two with a sad motive. The one
repeated incessantly 'Ohimé! mia madre morì;' the other was a girl's
love lament: 'Perchè tradirmi, perchè lasciarmi! prima d'amarmi non eri
così!' Even the children joined in these; and Catina, who took the solo
part in the second, was inspired to a great dramatic effort. All these
were purely popular songs. The people of Venice, however, are
passionate for operas. Therefore we had duets and solos from 'Ernani,'
the 'Ballo in Maschera,' and the 'Forza del Destino,' and one comic
chorus from 'Boccaccio,' which seemed to make them wild with
pleasure. To my mind, the best of these more formal pieces was a duet
between Attila and Italia from some opera unknown to me, which
Antonio and Piero performed with incomparable spirit. It was
noticeable how, descending to the people, sung by them for love at sea,
or on excursions to the villages round Mestre, these operatic
reminiscences had lost something of their theatrical formality, and
assumed instead the serious gravity, the quaint movement, and marked
emphasis which belong to popular music in Northern and Central Italy.
An antique character was communicated even to the recitative of Verdi
by slight, almost indefinable, changes of rhythm and accent. There was
no end to the singing. 'Siamo appassionati per il canto,' frequently
repeated, was proved true by the profusion and variety of songs
produced from inexhaustible memories, lightly tried over, brilliantly
performed, rapidly succeeding each other. Nor were gestures
wanting--lifted arms, hands stretched to hands, flashing eyes, hair
tossed from the forehead--unconscious and appropriate action--which
showed how the spirit of the music and words alike possessed the men.
One by one the children fell asleep. Little Attilio and Teresa were
tucked up beneath my Scotch shawl at two ends of a great sofa; and not
even his father's clarion voice, in the character of Italia defying Attila
to harm 'le mie superbe città,' could wake the little boy up. The night
wore on. It was past one. Eustace and I had promised to be in the
church of the Gesuati at six next morning. We therefore gave the guests
a gentle hint, which they as gently took. With exquisite, because
perfectly unaffected, breeding they sank for a few moments into
common conversation, then wrapped the children up, and took their
leave. It was an uncomfortable, warm, wet night of sullen scirocco.
The next day, which was Sunday, Francesco called me at five. There
was no visible sunrise that cheerless damp October morning. Grey
dawn stole somehow imperceptibly between the veil of clouds and
leaden waters, as my friend and I, well sheltered by our felze, passed
into the Giudecca, and took our station before the church of the Gesuati.
A few women from the neighbouring streets and courts crossed the
bridges in draggled petticoats on their way to first mass. A few men,
shouldering their jackets, lounged along the Zattere, opened the great
green doors, and entered. Then suddenly Antonio cried out that the
bridal party was on its way, not as we had expected, in boats, but on
foot. We left our gondola, and fell into the ranks, after shaking hands
with Francesco, who is the elder brother of the bride. There was
nothing very noticeable in her appearance, except her large dark eyes.
Otherwise both face and figure were of a common type; and her bridal
dress of sprigged grey silk, large veil and orange blossoms, reduced her
to the level of a bourgeoise. It was much the same with the bridegroom.
His features, indeed, proved him a true Venetian gondolier; for the skin
was strained over the cheekbones, and the muscles of the throat beneath
the jaws stood out like cords, and the bright blue eyes were deep-set
beneath a spare brown forehead. But he had provided a complete suit of
black for the occasion, and wore a shirt of worked cambric, which
disguised what is really splendid in the physique of these oarsmen, at
once slender and sinewy. Both bride and bridegroom looked
uncomfortable in their clothes. The light that fell upon them in the
church was dull and leaden. The ceremony, which was very hurriedly
performed by an unctuous priest, did not appear to impress either of
them. Nobody in the bridal party, crowding together on both sides of
the altar, looked as though the service was of the slightest interest and
moment. Indeed, this was hardly to be wondered at; for the priest, so
far as I could understand his gabble, took the larger portion for read,
after muttering the first words of the rubric. A little carven image of an
acolyte--a weird boy who seemed to move by springs, whose hair had
all the semblance of painted wood, and whose complexion was white
and red like a clown's--did not make matters more intelligible by
spasmodically clattering responses.
After the ceremony we heard mass and contributed to three distinct
offertories. Considering how much account even two soldi are to these
poor people, I was really angry when I heard the copper shower. Every
member of the party had his or her pennies ready, and dropped them
into the boxes. Whether it was the effect of the bad morning, or the
ugliness of a very ill-designed barocco building, or the fault of the fat
oily priest, I know not. But the sposalizio struck me as tame and
cheerless, the mass as irreverent and vulgarly conducted. At the same
time there is something too impressive in the mass for any perfunctory
performance to divest its symbolism of sublimity. A Protestant
Communion Service lends itself more easily to degradation by
unworthiness in the minister.
We walked down the church in double file, led by the bride and
bridegroom, who had knelt during the ceremony with the best
man--compare, as he is called--at a narrow prie-dieu before the altar.
The compare is a person of distinction at these weddings. He has to
present the bride with a great pyramid of artificial flowers, which is
placed before her at the marriage-feast, a packet of candles, and a box
of bonbons. The comfits, when the box is opened, are found to include
two magnificent sugar babies lying in their cradles. I was told that a
compare, who does the thing handsomely, must be prepared to spend
about a hundred francs upon these presents, in addition to the wine and
cigars with which he treats his friends. On this occasion the women
were agreed that he had done his duty well. He was a fat, wealthy little
man, who lived by letting market-boats for hire on the Rialto.
From the church to the bride's house was a walk of some three minutes.
On the way we were introduced to the father of the bride--a very
magnificent personage, with points of strong resemblance to Vittorio
Emmanuele. He wore an enormous broad-brimmed hat and
emerald-green earrings, and looked considerably younger than his
eldest son, Francesco. Throughout the nozze he took the lead in a grand
imperious fashion of his own. Wherever he went, he seemed to fill the
place, and was fully aware of his own importance. In Florence I think
he would have got the nickname of Tacchin, or turkey-cock. Here at
Venice the sons and daughters call their parent briefly Vecchio. I heard
him so addressed with a certain amount of awe, expecting an explosion
of bubbly-jock displeasure. But he took it, as though it was natural,
without disturbance. The other Vecchio, father of the bridegroom,
struck me as more sympathetic. He was a gentle old man, proud of his
many prosperous, laborious sons. They, like the rest of the gentlemen,
were gondoliers. Both the Vecchi, indeed, continue to ply their trade,
day and night, at the traghetto.
Traghetti are stations for gondolas at different points of the canals. As
their name implies, it is the first duty of the gondoliers upon them to
ferry people across. This they do for the fixed fee of five centimes. The
traghetti are in fact Venetian cab-stands. And, of course, like London
cabs, the gondolas may be taken off them for trips. The municipality,
however, makes it a condition, under penalty of fine to the traghetto,
that each station should always be provided with two boats for the
service of the ferry. When vacancies occur on the traghetti, a gondolier
who owns or hires a boat makes application to the municipality,
receives a number, and is inscribed as plying at a certain station. He has
now entered a sort of guild, which is presided over by a Capo-traghetto,
elected by the rest for the protection of their interests, the settlement of
disputes, and the management of their common funds. In the old acts of
Venice this functionary is styled Gastaldo di traghetto. The members
have to contribute something yearly to the guild. This payment varies
upon different stations, according to the greater or less amount of the
tax levied by the municipality on the traghetto. The highest
subscription I have heard of is twenty-five francs; the lowest, seven.
There is one traghetto, known by the name of Madonna del Giglio or
Zobenigo, which possesses near its pergola of vines a nice old brown
Venetian picture. Some stranger offered a considerable sum for this.
But the guild refused to part with it.
As may be imagined, the traghetti vary greatly in the amount and
quality of their custom. By far the best are those in the neighbourhood
of the hotels upon the Grand Canal. At any one of these a gondolier
during the season is sure of picking up some foreigner or other who
will pay him handsomely for comparatively light service. A traghetto
on the Giudecca, on the contrary, depends upon Venetian traffic. The
work is more monotonous, and the pay is reduced to its tariffed
minimum. So far as I can gather, an industrious gondolier, with a good
boat, belonging to a good traghetto, may make as much as ten or
fifteen francs in a single day. But this cannot be relied on. They
therefore prefer a fixed appointment with a private family, for which
they receive by tariff five francs a day, or by arrangement for long
periods perhaps four francs a day, with certain perquisites and small
advantages. It is great luck to get such an engagement for the winter.
The heaviest anxieties which beset a gondolier are then disposed of.
Having entered private service, they are not allowed to ply their trade
on the traghetto, except by stipulation with their masters. Then they
may take their place one night out of every six in the rank and file. The
gondoliers have two proverbs, which show how desirable it is, while
taking a fixed engagement, to keep their hold on the traghetto. One is
to this effect: il traghetto è un buon padrone. The other satirises the
meanness of the poverty-stricken Venetian nobility: pompa di servitù,
misera insegna. When they combine the traghetto with private service,
the municipality insists on their retaining the number painted on their
gondola; and against this their employers frequently object. It is
therefore a great point for a gondolier to make such an arrangement
with his master as will leave him free to show his number. The reason
for this regulation is obvious. Gondoliers are known more by their
numbers and their traghetti than their names. They tell me that though
there are upwards of a thousand registered in Venice, each man of the
trade knows the whole confraternity by face and number. Taking all
things into consideration, I think four francs a day the whole year round
are very good earnings for a gondolier. On this he will marry and rear a
family, and put a little money by. A young unmarried man, working at
two and a half or three francs a day, is proportionately well-to-do. If he
is economical, he ought upon these wages to save enough in two or
three years to buy himself a gondola. A boy from fifteen to nineteen is
called a mezz' uomo, and gets about one franc a day. A new gondola
with all its fittings is worth about a thousand francs. It does not last in
good condition more than six or seven years. At the end of that time the
hull will fetch eighty francs. A new hull can be had for three hundred
francs. The old fittings--brass sea-horses or cavalli, steel prow or ferro,
covered cabin or felze, cushions and leather-covered back-board or
stramazetto, maybe transferred to it. When a man wants to start a
gondola, he will begin by buying one already half past service--a
gondola da traghetto or di mezza età. This should cost him something
over two hundred francs. Little by little, he accumulates the needful
fittings; and when his first purchase is worn out, he hopes to set up with
a well-appointed equipage. He thus gradually works his way from the
rough trade which involves hard work and poor earnings to that more
profitable industry which cannot be carried on without a smart boat.
The gondola is a source of continual expense for repairs. Its oars have
to be replaced. It has to be washed with sponges, blacked, and
varnished. Its bottom needs frequent cleaning. Weeds adhere to it in the
warm brackish water, growing rapidly through the summer months, and
demanding to be scrubbed off once in every four weeks. The gondolier
has no place where he can do this for himself. He therefore takes his
boat to a wharf, or squero, as the place is called. At these squeri
gondolas are built as well as cleaned. The fee for a thorough setting to
rights of the boat is five francs. It must be done upon a fine day. Thus
in addition to the cost, the owner loses a good day's work.
These details will serve to give some notion of the sort of people with
whom Eustace and I spent our day. The bride's house is in an excellent
position on an open canal leading from the Canalozzo to the Giudecca.
She had arrived before us, and received her friends in the middle of the
room. Each of us in turn kissed her cheek and murmured our
congratulations. We found the large living-room of the house arranged
with chairs all round the walls, and the company were marshalled in
some order of precedence, my friend and I taking place near the bride.
On either hand airy bedrooms opened out, and two large doors, wide
open, gave a view from where we sat of a good-sized kitchen. This
arrangement of the house was not only comfortable, but pretty; for the
bright copper pans and pipkins ranged on shelves along the kitchen
walls had a very cheerful effect. The walls were whitewashed, but
literally covered with all sorts of pictures. A great plaster cast from
some antique, an Atys, Adonis, or Paris, looked down from a bracket
placed between the windows. There was enough furniture, solid and
well kept, in all the rooms. Among the pictures were full-length
portraits in oils of two celebrated gondoliers--one in antique costume,
the other painted a few years since. The original of the latter soon came
and stood before it. He had won regatta prizes; and the flags of four
discordant colours were painted round him by the artist, who had
evidently cared more to commemorate the triumphs of his sitter and to
strike a likeness than to secure the tone of his own picture. This
champion turned out a fine fellow--Corradini--with one of the brightest
little gondoliers of thirteen for his son.
After the company were seated, lemonade and cakes were handed
round amid a hubbub of chattering women. Then followed cups of
black coffee and more cakes. Then a glass of Cyprus and more cakes.
Then a glass of curaçoa and more cakes. Finally, a glass of noyau and
still more cakes. It was only a little after seven in the morning. Yet
politeness compelled us to consume these delicacies. I tried to shirk my
duty; but this discretion was taken by my hosts for well-bred modesty;
and instead of being let off, I had the richest piece of pastry and the
largest maccaroon available pressed so kindly on me, that, had they
been poisoned, I would not have refused to eat them. The conversation
grew more, and more animated, the women gathering together in their
dresses of bright blue and scarlet, the men lighting cigars and puffing
out a few quiet words. It struck me as a drawback that these picturesque
people had put on Sunday-clothes to look as much like shopkeepers as
possible. But they did not all of them succeed. Two handsome women,
who handed the cups round--one a brunette, the other a blonde--wore
skirts of brilliant blue, with a sort of white jacket, and white kerchief
folded heavily about their shoulders. The brunette had a great string of
coral, the blonde of amber, round her throat. Gold earrings and the long
gold chains Venetian women wear, of all patterns and degrees of value,
abounded. Nobody appeared without them; but I could not see any of
an antique make. The men seemed to be contented with rings--huge,
heavy rings of solid gold, worked with a rough flower pattern. One
young fellow had three upon his fingers. This circumstance led me to
speculate whether a certain portion at least of this display of jewellery
around me had not been borrowed for the occasion.
Eustace and I were treated quite like friends. They called us I Signori.
But this was only, I think, because our English names are quite
unmanageable. The women fluttered about us and kept asking whether
we really liked it all? whether we should come to the pranzo? whether
it was true we danced? It seemed to give them unaffected pleasure to be
kind to us; and when we rose to go away, the whole company crowded
round, shaking hands and saying: 'Si divertirà bene stasera!' Nobody
resented our presence; what was better, no one put himself out for us.
'Vogliono veder il nostro costume,' I heard one woman say.
We got home soon after eight, and, as our ancestors would have said,
settled our stomachs with a dish of tea. It makes me shudder now to
think of the mixed liquids and miscellaneous cakes we had consumed
at that unwonted hour.
At half-past three, Eustace and I again prepared ourselves for action.
His gondola was in attendance, covered with the felze, to take us to the
house of the sposa. We found the canal crowded with poor people of
the quarter--men, women, and children lining the walls along its side,
and clustering like bees upon the bridges. The water itself was almost
choked with gondolas. Evidently the folk of San Vio thought our
wedding procession would be a most exciting pageant. We entered the
house, and were again greeted by the bride and bridegroom, who
consigned each of us to the control of a fair tyrant. This is the most
fitting way of describing our introduction to our partners of the evening;
for we were no sooner presented, than the ladies swooped upon us like
their prey, placing their shawls upon our left arms, while they seized
and clung to what was left available of us for locomotion. There was
considerable giggling and tittering throughout the company when
Signora Fenzo, the young and comely wife of a gondolier, thus took
possession of Eustace, and Signora dell' Acqua, the widow of another
gondolier, appropriated me. The affair had been arranged beforehand,
and their friends had probably chaffed them with the difficulty of
managing two mad Englishmen. However, they proved equal to the
occasion, and the difficulties were entirely on our side. Signora Fenzo
was a handsome brunette, quiet in her manners, who meant business. I
envied Eustace his subjection to such a reasonable being. Signora dell'
Acqua, though a widow, was by no means disconsolate; and I soon
perceived that it would require all the address and diplomacy I
possessed, to make anything out of her society. She laughed incessantly;
darted in the most diverse directions, dragging me along with her;
exhibited me in triumph to her cronies; made eyes at me over a fan,
repeated my clumsiest remarks, as though they gave her indescribable
amusement; and all the while jabbered Venetian at express rate, without
the slightest regard for my incapacity to follow her vagaries. The
Vecchio marshalled us in order. First went the sposa and comare with
the mothers of bride and bridegroom. Then followed the sposo and the
bridesmaid. After them I was made to lead my fair tormentor. As we
descended the staircase there arose a hubbub of excitement from the
crowd on the canals. The gondolas moved turbidly upon the face of the
waters. The bridegroom kept muttering to himself, 'How we shall be
criticised! They will tell each other who was decently dressed, and who
stepped awkwardly into the boats, and what the price of my boots was!'
Such exclamations, murmured at intervals, and followed by
chest-drawn sighs, expressed a deep preoccupation. With regard to his
boots, he need have had no anxiety. They were of the shiniest patent
leather, much too tight, and without a speck of dust upon them. But his
nervousness infected me with a cruel dread. All those eyes were going
to watch how we comported ourselves in jumping from the
landing-steps into the boat! If this operation, upon a ceremonious
occasion, has terrors even for a gondolier, how formidable it ought to
be to me! And here is the Signora dell' Acqua's white cachemire shawl
dangling on one arm, and the Signora herself languishingly clinging to
the other; and the gondolas are fretting in a fury of excitement, like
corks, upon the churned green water! The moment was terrible. The
sposa and her three companions had been safely stowed away beneath
their felze. The sposo had successfully handed the bridesmaid into the
second gondola. I had to perform the same office for my partner. Off
she went, like a bird, from the bank. I seized a happy moment, followed,
bowed, and found myself to my contentment gracefully ensconced in a
corner opposite the widow. Seven more gondolas were packed. The
procession moved. We glided down the little channel, broke away into
the Grand Canal, crossed it, and dived into a labyrinth from which we
finally emerged before our destination, the Trattoria di San Gallo. The
perils of the landing were soon over; and, with the rest of the guests,
my mercurial companion and I slowly ascended a long flight of stairs
leading to a vast upper chamber. Here we were to dine.
It had been the gallery of some palazzo in old days, was above one
hundred feet in length, fairly broad, with a roof of wooden rafters and
large windows opening on a courtyard garden. I could see the tops of
three cypress-trees cutting the grey sky upon a level with us. A long
table occupied the centre of this room. It had been laid for upwards of
forty persons, and we filled it. There was plenty of light from great
glass lustres blazing with gas. When the ladies had arranged their
dresses, and the gentlemen had exchanged a few polite remarks, we all
sat down to dinner--I next my inexorable widow, Eustace beside his
calm and comely partner. The first impression was one of
disappointment. It looked so like a public dinner of middle-class people.
There was no local character in costume or customs. Men and women
sat politely bored, expectant, trifling with their napkins, yawning,
muttering nothings about the weather or their neighbours. The frozen
commonplaceness of the scene was made for me still more oppressive
by Signora dell' Acqua. She was evidently satirical, and could not be
happy unless continually laughing at or with somebody. 'What a stick
the woman will think me!' I kept saying to myself. 'How shall I ever
invent jokes in this strange land? I cannot even flirt with her in
Venetian! And here I have condemned myself--and her too, poor
thing--to sit through at least three hours of mortal dulness!' Yet the
widow was by no means unattractive. Dressed in black, she had
contrived by an artful arrangement of lace and jewellery to give an air
of lightness to her costume. She had a pretty little pale face, a minois
chiffonné, with slightly turned-up nose, large laughing brown eyes, a
dazzling set of teeth, and a tempestuously frizzled mop of powdered
hair. When I managed to get a side-look at her quietly, without being
giggled at or driven half mad by unintelligible incitements to a
jocularity I could not feel, it struck me that, if we once found a
common term of communication we should become good friends. But
for the moment that modus vivendi seemed unattainable. She had not
recovered from the first excitement of her capture of me. She was still
showing me off and trying to stir me up. The arrival of the soup gave
me a momentary relief; and soon the serious business of the afternoon
began. I may add that before dinner was over, the Signora dell' Acqua
and I were fast friends. I had discovered the way of making jokes, and
she had become intelligible. I found her a very nice, though flighty,
little woman; and I believe she thought me gifted with the faculty of
uttering eccentric epigrams in a grotesque tongue. Some of my remarks
were flung about the table, and had the same success as uncouth
Lombard carvings have with connoisseurs in naïvetés of art. By that
time we had come to be compare and comare to each other--the sequel
of some clumsy piece of jocularity.
It was a heavy entertainment, copious in quantity, excellent in quality,
plainly but well cooked. I remarked there was no fish. The widow
replied that everybody present ate fish to satiety at home. They did not
join a marriage feast at the San Gallo, and pay their nine francs, for that!
It should be observed that each guest paid for his own entertainment.
This appears to be the custom. Therefore attendance is complimentary,
and the married couple are not at ruinous charges for the banquet. A
curious feature in the whole proceeding had its origin in this custom. I
noticed that before each cover lay an empty plate, and that my partner
began with the first course to heap upon it what she had not eaten. She
also took large helpings, and kept advising me to do the same. I said:
'No; I only take what I want to eat; if I fill that plate in front of me as
you are doing, it will be great waste.' This remark elicited shrieks of
laughter from all who heard it; and when the hubbub had subsided, I
perceived an apparently official personage bearing down upon Eustace,
who was in the same perplexity. It was then circumstantially explained
to us that the empty plates were put there in order that we might lay
aside what we could not conveniently eat, and take it home with us. At
the end of the dinner the widow (whom I must now call my comare)
had accumulated two whole chickens, half a turkey, and a large
assortment of mixed eatables. I performed my duty and won her regard
by placing delicacies at her disposition.
Crudely stated, this proceeding moves disgust. But that is only because
one has not thought the matter out. In the performance there was
nothing coarse or nasty. These good folk had made a contract at so
much a head--so many fowls, so many pounds of beef, &c, to be
supplied; and what they had fairly bought, they clearly had a right to.
No one, so far as I could notice, tried to take more than his proper share;
except, indeed, Eustace and myself. In our first eagerness to conform to
custom, we both overshot the mark, and grabbed at disproportionate
helpings. The waiters politely observed that we were taking what was
meant for two; and as the courses followed in interminable sequence,
we soon acquired the tact of what was due to us.
Meanwhile the room grew warm. The gentlemen threw off their
coats--a pleasant liberty of which I availed myself, and was
immediately more at ease. The ladies divested themselves of their
shoes (strange to relate!) and sat in comfort with their stockinged feet
upon the scagliola pavement. I observed that some cavaliers by special
permission were allowed to remove their partners' slippers. This was
not my lucky fate. My comare had not advanced to that point of
intimacy. Healths began to be drunk. The conversation took a lively
turn; and women went fluttering round the table, visiting their friends,
to sip out of their glass, and ask each other how they were getting on. It
was not long before the stiff veneer of bourgeoisie which bored me had
worn off. The people emerged in their true selves: natural, gentle,
sparkling with enjoyment, playful. Playful is, I think, the best word to
describe them. They played with infinite grace and innocence, like
kittens, from the old men of sixty to the little boys of thirteen. Very
little wine was drunk. Each guest had a litre placed before him. Many
did not finish theirs; and for very few was it replenished. When at last
the dessert arrived, and the bride's comfits had been handed round, they
began to sing. It was very pretty to see a party of three or four friends
gathering round some popular beauty, and paying her compliments in
verse--they grouped behind her chair, she sitting back in it and laughing
up to them, and joining in the chorus. The words, 'Brunetta mia
simpatica, ti amo sempre più,' sung after this fashion to Eustace's
handsome partner, who puffed delicate whiffs from a Russian cigarette,
and smiled her thanks, had a peculiar appropriateness. All the ladies, it
may be observed in passing, had by this time lit their cigarettes. The
men were smoking Toscani, Sellas, or Cavours, and the little boys were
dancing round the table breathing smoke from their pert nostrils.
The dinner, in fact, was over. Other relatives of the guests arrived, and
then we saw how some of the reserved dishes were to be bestowed. A
side-table was spread at the end of the gallery, and these late-comers
were regaled with plenty by their friends. Meanwhile, the big table at
which we had dined was taken to pieces and removed. The scagliola
floor was swept by the waiters. Musicians came streaming in and took
their places. The ladies resumed their shoes. Every one prepared to
dance.
My friend and I were now at liberty to chat with the men. He knew
some of them by sight, and claimed acquaintance with others. There
was plenty of talk about different boats, gondolas, and sandolos and
topos, remarks upon the past season, and inquiries as to chances of
engagements in the future. One young fellow told us how he had been
drawn for the army, and should be obliged to give up his trade just
when he had begun to make it answer. He had got a new gondola, and
this would have to be hung up during the years of his service. The
warehousing of a boat in these circumstances costs nearly one hundred
francs a year, which is a serious tax upon the pockets of a private in the
line. Many questions were put in turn to us, but all of the same tenor.
'Had we really enjoyed the pranzo? Now, really, were we amusing
ourselves? And did we think the custom of the wedding un bel
costume?' We could give an unequivocally hearty response to all these
interrogations. The men seemed pleased. Their interest in our
enjoyment was unaffected. It is noticeable how often the word
divertimento is heard upon the lips of the Italians. They have a notion
that it is the function in life of the Signori to amuse themselves.
The ball opened, and now we were much besought by the ladies. I had
to deny myself with a whole series of comical excuses. Eustace
performed his duty after a stiff English fashion--once with his pretty
partner of the pranzo, and once again with a fat gondolier. The band
played waltzes and polkas, chiefly upon patriotic airs--the Marcia Reale,
Garibaldi's Hymn, &c. Men danced with men, women with women,
little boys and girls together. The gallery whirled with a laughing
crowd. There was plenty of excitement and enjoyment--not an
unseemly or extravagant word or gesture. My comare careered about
with a light mænadic impetuosity, which made me regret my inability
to accept her pressing invitations. She pursued me into every corner of
the room, but when at last I dropped excuses and told her that my real
reason for not dancing was that it would hurt my health, she waived her
claims at once with an Ah, poverino!
Some time after midnight we felt that we had had enough of
divertimento. Francesco helped us to slip out unobserved. With many
silent good wishes we left the innocent playful people who had been so
kind to us. The stars were shining from a watery sky as we passed into
the piazza beneath the Campanile and the pinnacles of S. Mark. The
Riva was almost empty, and the little waves fretted the boats moored to
the piazzetta, as a warm moist breeze went fluttering by. We smoked a
last cigar, crossed our traghetto, and were soon sound asleep at the end
of a long pleasant day. The ball, we heard next morning, finished about
four.
Since that evening I have had plenty of opportunities for seeing my
friends the gondoliers, both in their own homes and in my apartment.
Several have entertained me at their mid-day meal of fried fish and
amber-coloured polenta. These repasts were always cooked with
scrupulous cleanliness, and served upon a table covered with coarse
linen. The polenta is turned out upon a wooden platter, and cut with a
string called lassa. You take a large slice of it on the palm of the left
hand, and break it with the fingers of the right. Wholesome red wine of
the Paduan district and good white bread were never wanting. The
rooms in which we met to eat looked out on narrow lanes or over
pergolas of yellowing vines. Their whitewashed walls were hung with
photographs of friends and foreigners, many of them souvenirs from
English or American employers. The men, in broad black hats and lilac
shirts, sat round the table, girt with the red waist-wrapper, or fascia,
which marks the ancient faction of the Castellani. The other faction,
called Nicolotti, are distinguished by a black assisa. The quarters of the
town are divided unequally and irregularly into these two parties. What
was once a formidable rivalry between two sections of the Venetian
populace, still survives in challenges to trials of strength and skill upon
the water. The women, in their many-coloured kerchiefs, stirred polenta
at the smoke-blackened chimney, whose huge pent-house roof projects
two feet or more across the hearth. When they had served the table they
took their seat on low stools, knitted stockings, or drank out of glasses
handed across the shoulder to them by their lords. Some of these
women were clearly notable housewives, and I have no reason to
suppose that they do not take their full share of the housework. Boys
and girls came in and out, and got a portion of the dinner to consume
where they thought best. Children went tottering about upon the
red-brick floor, the playthings of those hulking fellows, who handled
them very gently and spoke kindly in a sort of confidential whisper to
their ears. These little ears were mostly pierced for earrings, and the
light blue eyes of the urchins peeped maliciously beneath shocks of
yellow hair. A dog was often of the party. He ate fish like his masters,
and was made to beg for it by sitting up and rowing with his paws.
Voga, Azzò, voga! The Anzolo who talked thus to his little brown
Spitz-dog has the hoarse voice of a Triton and the movement of an
animated sea-wave. Azzo performed his trick, swallowed his fish-bones,
and the fiery Anzolo looked round approvingly.
On all these occasions I have found these gondoliers the same
sympathetic, industrious, cheery affectionate folk. They live in many
respects a hard and precarious life. The winter in particular is a time of
anxiety, and sometimes of privation, even to the well-to-do among
them. Work then is scarce, and what there is, is rendered disagreeable
to them by the cold. Yet they take their chance with facile temper, and
are not soured by hardships. The amenities of the Venetian sea and air,
the healthiness of the lagoons, the cheerful bustle of the poorer quarters,
the brilliancy of this Southern sunlight, and the beauty which is
everywhere apparent, must be reckoned as important factors in the
formation of their character. And of that character, as I have said, the
final note is playfulness. In spite of difficulties, their life has never been
stern enough to sadden them. Bare necessities are marvellously cheap,
and the pinch of real bad weather--such frost as locked the lagoons in
ice two years ago, or such south-western gales as flooded the basement
floors of all the houses on the Zattere--is rare and does not last long. On
the other hand, their life has never been so lazy as to reduce them to the
savagery of the traditional Neapolitan lazzaroni. They have had to work
daily for small earnings, but under favourable conditions, and their
labour has been lightened by much good-fellowship among themselves,
by the amusements of their feste and their singing clubs.
Of course it is not easy for a stranger in a very different social position
to feel that he has been admitted to their confidence. Italians have an
ineradicable habit of making themselves externally agreeable, of
bending in all indifferent matters to the whims and wishes of superiors,
and of saying what they think Signori like. This habit, while it
smoothes the surface of existence, raises up a barrier of compliment
and partial insincerity, against which the more downright natures of us
Northern folk break in vain efforts. Our advances are met with an
imperceptible but impermeable resistance by the very people who are
bent on making the world pleasant to us. It is the very reverse of that
dour opposition which a Lowland Scot or a North English peasant
offers to familiarity; but it is hardly less insurmountable. The treatment,
again, which Venetians of the lower class have received through
centuries from their own nobility, makes attempts at fraternisation on
the part of gentlemen unintelligible to them. The best way, here and
elsewhere, of overcoming these obstacles is to have some bond of work
or interest in common--of service on the one side rendered, and
goodwill on the other honestly displayed. The men of whom I have
been speaking will, I am convinced, not shirk their share of duty or
make unreasonable claims upon the generosity of their employers.
*****
A CINQUE CENTO BRUTUS
I.--THE SESTIERE DI SAN POLO
There is a quarter of Venice not much visited by tourists, lying as it
does outside their beat, away from the Rialto, at a considerable distance
from the Frari and San Rocco, in what might almost pass for a city
separated by a hundred miles from the Piazza. This is the quarter of San
Polo, one corner of which, somewhere between the back of the Palazzo
Foscari and the Campo di San Polo, was the scene of a memorable act
of vengeance in the year 1546. Here Lorenzino de' Medici, the
murderer of his cousin Alessandro, was at last tracked down and put to
death by paid cut-throats. How they succeeded in their purpose, we
know in every detail from the narrative dictated by the chief assassin.
His story so curiously illustrates the conditions of life in Italy three
centuries ago, that I have thought it worthy of abridgment. But, in order
to make it intelligible, and to paint the manners of the times more fully,
I must first relate the series of events which led to Lorenzino's murder
of his cousin Alessandro, and from that to his own subsequent
assassination. Lorenzino de' Medici, the Florentine Brutus of the
sixteenth century, is the hero of the tragedy. Some of his relatives,
however, must first appear upon the scene before he enters with a
patriot's knife concealed beneath a court-fool's bauble.
II.--THE MURDER OF IPPOLITO DE' MEDICI
After the final extinction of the Florentine Republic, the hopes of the
Medici, who now aspired to the dukedom of Tuscany, rested on three
bastards--Alessandro, the reputed child of Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino;
Ippolito, the natural son of Giuliano, Duke of Nemours; and Giulio, the
offspring of an elder Giuliano, who was at this time Pope, with the title
of Clement VII. Clement had seen Rome sacked in 1527 by a horde of
freebooters fighting under the Imperial standard, and had used the
remnant of these troops, commanded by the Prince of Orange, to crush
his native city in the memorable siege of 1529-30. He now determined
to rule Florence from the Papal chair by the help of the two bastard
cousins I have named. Alessandro was created Duke of Cività di Penna,
and sent to take the first place in the city. Ippolito was made a cardinal;
since the Medici had learned that Rome was the real basis of their
power, and it was undoubtedly in Clement's policy to advance this
scion of his house to the Papacy. The sole surviving representative of
the great Lorenzo de' Medici's legitimate blood was Catherine, daughter
of the Duke of Urbino by Madeleine de la Tour d'Auvergne. She was
pledged in marriage to the Duke of Orleans, who was afterwards Henry
II. of France. A natural daughter of the Emperor Charles V. was
provided for her putative half-brother Alessandro. By means of these
alliances the succession of Ippolito to the Papal chair would have been
secured, and the strength of the Medici would have been confirmed in
Tuscany, but for the disasters which have now to be related.
Between the cousins Alessandro and Ippolito there was no love lost. As
boys, they had both played the part of princes in Florence under the
guardianship of the Cardinal Passerini da Cortona. The higher rank had
then been given to Ippolito, who bore the title of Magnifico, and
seemed thus designated for the lordship of the city. Ippolito, though
only half a Medici, was of more authentic lineage than Alessandro; for
no proof positive could be adduced that the latter was even a spurious
child of the Duke of Urbino. He bore obvious witness to his mother's
blood upon his mulatto's face; but this mother was the wife of a groom,
and it was certain that in the court of Urbino she had not been chary of
her favours. The old magnificence of taste, the patronage of art and
letters, and the preference for liberal studies which distinguished Casa
Medici, survived in Ippolito; whereas Alessandro manifested only the
brutal lusts of a debauched tyrant. It was therefore with great reluctance
that, moved by reasons of state and domestic policy, Ippolito saw
himself compelled to accept the scarlet hat. Alessandro having been
recognised as a son of the Duke of Urbino, had become half-brother to
the future Queen of France. To treat him as the head of the family was
a necessity thrust, in the extremity of the Medicean fortunes, upon
Clement. Ippolito, who more entirely represented the spirit of the house,
was driven to assume the position of a cadet, with all the uncertainties
of an ecclesiastical career.
In these circumstances Ippolito had not strength of character to
sacrifice himself for the consolidation of the Medicean power, which
could only have been effected by maintaining a close bond of union
between its members. The death of Clement in 1534 obscured his
prospects in the Church. He was still too young to intrigue for the tiara.
The new Pope, Alessandro Farnese, soon after his election, displayed a
vigour which was unexpected from his age, together with a nepotism
which his previous character had scarcely warranted. The Cardinal de'
Medici felt himself excluded and oppressed. He joined the party of
those numerous Florentine exiles, headed by Filippo Strozzi, and the
Cardinals Salviati and Ridolfi, all of whom were connected by
marriage with the legitimate Medici, and who unanimously hated and
were jealous of the Duke of Cività di Penna. On the score of policy it is
difficult to condemn this step. Alessandro's hold upon Florence was
still precarious, nor had he yet married Margaret of Austria. Perhaps
Ippolito was right in thinking he had less to gain from his cousin than
from the anti-Medicean faction and the princes of the Church who
favoured it. But he did not play his cards well. He quarrelled with the
new Pope, Paul III., and by his vacillations led the Florentine exiles to
suspect he might betray them.
In the summer of 1535 Ippolito was at Itri, a little town not far from
Gaeta and Terracina, within easy reach of Fondi, where dwelt the
beautiful Giulia Gonzaga. To this lady the Cardinal paid assiduous
court, passing his time with her in the romantic scenery of that
world-famous Capuan coast. On the 5th of August his seneschal,
Giovann' Andrea, of Borgo San Sepolcro, brought him a bowl of
chicken-broth, after drinking which he exclaimed to one of his
attendants, 'I have been poisoned, and the man who did it is Giovann'
Andrea.' The seneschal was taken and tortured, and confessed that he
had mixed a poison with the broth. Four days afterwards the Cardinal
died, and a post-mortem examination showed that the omentum had
been eaten by some corrosive substance. Giovann' Andrea was sent in
chains to Rome; but in spite of his confession, more than once repeated,
the court released him. He immediately took refuge with Alessandro de'
Medici in Florence, whence he repaired to Borgo San Sepolcro, and
was, at the close of a few months, there murdered by the people of the
place. From these circumstances it was conjectured, not without good
reason, that Alessandro had procured his cousin's death; and a certain
Captain Pignatta, of low birth in Florence, a bravo and a coward, was
believed to have brought the poison to Itri from the Duke. The
Medicean courtiers at Florence did not disguise their satisfaction; and
one of them exclaimed, with reference to the event, 'We know how to
brush flies from our noses!'
III.--THE MURDER OF ALESSANDRO DE' MEDICI
Having removed his cousin and rival from the scene, Alessandro de'
Medici plunged with even greater effrontery into the cruelties and
debaucheries which made him odious in Florence. It seemed as though
fortune meant to smile on him; for in this same year (1535) Charles V.
decided at Naples in his favour against the Florentine exiles, who were
pleading their own cause and that of the city injured by his tyrannies;
and in February of the following year he married Margaret of Austria,
the Emperor's natural daughter. Francesco Guicciardini, the first
statesman and historian of his age, had undertaken his defence, and was
ready to support him by advice and countenance in the conduct of his
government. Within the lute of this prosperity, however, there was one
little rift. For some months past he had closely attached to his person a
certain kinsman, Lorenzo de' Medici, who was descended in the fourth
generation from Lorenzo, the brother of Cosimo Pater Patriæ. This
Lorenzo, or Lorenzino, or Lorenzaccio, as his most intimate
acquaintances called him, was destined to murder Alessandro; and it is
worthy of notice that the Duke had received frequent warnings of his
fate. A Perugian page, for instance, who suffered from some infirmity,
saw in a dream that Lorenzino would kill his master. Astrologers
predicted that the Duke must die by having his throat cut. One of them
is said to have named Lorenzo de' Medici as the assassin; and another
described him so accurately that there was no mistaking the man.
Moreover, Madonna Lucrezia Salviati wrote to the Duke from Rome
that he should beware of a certain person, indicating Lorenzino; and her
daughter, Madonna Maria, told him to his face she hated the young
man, 'because I know he means to murder you, and murder you he will.'
Nor was this all. The Duke's favourite body-servants mistrusted
Lorenzino. On one occasion, when Alessandro and Lorenzino, attended
by a certain Giomo, were escalading a wall at night, as was their wont
upon illicit love-adventures, Giomo whispered to his master: 'Ah, my
lord, do let me cut the rope, and rid ourselves of him!' To which the
Duke replied: 'No, I do not want this; but if he could, I know he'd twist
it round my neck.'
In spite, then, of these warnings and the want of confidence he felt, the
Duke continually lived with Lorenzino, employing him as pander in his
intrigues, and preferring his society to that of simpler men. When he
rode abroad, he took this evil friend upon his crupper; although he
knew for certain that Lorenzino had stolen a tight-fitting vest of mail he
used to wear, and, while his arms were round his waist, was always
meditating how to stick a poignard in his body. He trusted, so it seems,
to his own great strength and to the other's physical weakness.
At this point, since Lorenzino is the principal actor in the two-act
drama which follows, it will be well to introduce him to the reader in
the words of Varchi, who was personally acquainted with him. Born at
Florence in 1514, he was left early by his father's death to the sole care
of his mother, Maria Soderini, 'a lady of rare prudence and goodness,
who attended with the utmost pains and diligence to his education. No
sooner, however, had he acquired the rudiments of humane learning,
which, being of very quick parts, he imbibed with incredible facility,
than he began to display a restless mind, insatiable and appetitive of
vice. Soon afterwards, under the rule and discipline of Filippo Strozzi,
he made open sport of all things human and divine; and preferring the
society of low persons, who not only flattered him but were congenial
to his tastes, he gave free rein to his desires, especially in affairs of love,
without regard for sex or age or quality, and in his secret soul, while he
lavished feigned caresses upon every one he saw, felt no esteem for any
living being. He thirsted strangely for glory, and omitted no point of
deed or word that might, he thought, procure him the reputation of a
man of spirit or of wit. He was lean of person, somewhat slightly built,
and on this account people called him Lorenzino. He never laughed, but
had a sneering smile; and although he was rather distinguished by grace
than beauty, his countenance being dark and melancholy, still in the
flower of his age he was beloved beyond all measure by Pope Clement;
in spite of which he had it in his mind (according to what he said
himself after killing the Duke Alessandro) to have murdered him. He
brought Francesco di Raffaello de' Medici, the Pope's rival, who was a
young man of excellent attainments and the highest hope, to such
extremity that he lost his wits, and became the sport of the whole court
at Rome, and was sent back, as a lesser evil, as a confirmed madman to
Florence.' Varchi proceeds to relate how Lorenzino fell into disfavour
with the Pope and the Romans by chopping the heads off statues from
the arch of Constantine and other monuments; for which act of
vandalism Molsa impeached him in the Roman Academy, and a price
was set upon his head. Having returned to Florence, he proceeded to
court Duke Alessandro, into whose confidence he wormed himself,
pretending to play the spy upon the exiles, and affecting a personal
timidity which put the Prince off his guard. Alessandro called him 'the
philosopher,' because he conversed in solitude with his own thoughts
and seemed indifferent to wealth and office. But all this while
Lorenzino was plotting how to murder him.
Giovio's account of this strange intimacy may be added, since it
completes the picture I have drawn from Varchi:--'Lorenzo made
himself the accomplice and instrument of those amorous amusements
for which the Duke had an insatiable appetite, with the object of
deceiving him. He was singularly well furnished with all the
scoundrelly arts and trained devices of the pander's trade; composed
fine verses to incite to lust; wrote and represented comedies in Italian;
and pretended to take pleasure only in such tricks and studies.
Therefore he never carried arms like other courtiers, and feigned to be
afraid of blood, a man who sought tranquillity at any price. Besides, he
bore a pallid countenance and melancholy brow, walking alone, talking
very little and with few persons. He haunted solitary places apart from
the city, and showed such plain signs of hypochondria that some began
covertly to pass jokes on him. Certain others, who were more acute,
suspected that he was harbouring and devising in his mind some
terrible enterprise.' The Prologue to Lorenzino's own comedy of
'Aridosiso' brings the sardonic, sneering, ironical man vividly before us.
He calls himself 'un certo omiciatto, che non è nessun di voi che
veggendolo non l'avesse a noia, pensando che egli abbia fatto una
commedia;' and begs the audience to damn his play to save him the
tedium of writing another. Criticised by the light of his subsequent
actions, this prologue may even be understood to contain a covert
promise of the murder he was meditating.
'In this way,' writes Varchi, 'the Duke had taken such familiarity with
Lorenzo, that, not content with making use of him as a ruffian in his
dealings with women, whether religious or secular, maidens or wives or
widows, noble or plebeian, young or elderly, as it might happen, he
applied to him to procure for his pleasure a half-sister of Lorenzo's own
mother, a young lady of marvellous beauty, but not less chaste than
beautiful, who was the wife of Lionardo Ginori, and lived not far from
the back entrance to the palace of the Medici.' Lorenzino undertook this
odious commission, seeing an opportunity to work his designs against
the Duke. But first he had to form an accomplice, since he could not
hope to carry out the murder without help. A bravo, called Michele del
Tavolaccino, but better known by the nickname of Scoronconcolo,
struck him as a fitting instrument. He had procured this man's pardon
for a homicide, and it appears that the fellow retained a certain sense of
gratitude. Lorenzino began by telling the man there was a courtier who
put insults upon him, and Scoronconcolo professed his readiness to kill
the knave. 'Sia chi si voglia; io l'ammazzerò, se fosse Cristo.' Up to the
last minute the name of Alessandro was not mentioned. Having thus
secured his assistant, Lorenzino chose a night when he knew that
Alessandro Vitelli, captain of the Duke's guard, would be from home.
Then, after supper, he whispered in Alessandro's ear that at last he had
seduced his aunt with an offer of money, and that she would come to
his, Lorenzo's chamber at the service of the Duke that night. Only the
Duke must appear at the rendezvous alone, and when he had arrived,
the lady should be fetched. 'Certain it is,' says Varchi, 'that the Duke,
having donned a cloak of satin in the Neapolitan style, lined with sable,
when he went to take his gloves, and there were some of mail and some
of perfumed leather, hesitated awhile and said: "Which shall I choose,
those of war, or those of love-making?"' He took the latter and went out
with only four attendants, three of whom he dismissed upon the Piazza
di San Marco, while one was stationed just opposite Lorenzo's house,
with strict orders not to stir if he should see folk enter or issue thence.
But this fellow, called the Hungarian, after waiting a great while,
returned to the Duke's chamber, and there went to sleep.
Meanwhile Lorenzino received Alessandro in his bedroom, where there
was a good fire. The Duke unbuckled his sword, which Lorenzino took,
and having entangled the belt with the hilt, so that it should not readily
be drawn, laid it on the pillow. The Duke had flung himself already on
the bed, and hid himself among the curtains--doing this, it is supposed,
to save himself from the trouble of paying compliments to the lady
when she should arrive. For Caterina Ginori had the fame of a fair
speaker, and Alessandro was aware of his own incapacity to play the
part of a respectful lover. Nothing could more strongly point the man's
brutality than this act, which contributed in no small measure to his
ruin.
Lorenzino left the Duke upon the bed, and went at once for
Scoronconcolo. He told him that the enemy was caught, and bade him
only mind the work he had to do. 'That will I do,' the bravo answered,
'even though it were the Duke himself.' 'You've hit the mark,' said
Lorenzino with a face of joy; 'he cannot slip through our fingers.
Come!' So they mounted to the bedroom, and Lorenzino, knowing
where the Duke was laid, cried: 'Sir, are you asleep?' and therewith ran
him through the back. Alessandro was sleeping, or pretending to sleep,
face downwards, and the sword passed through his kidneys and
diaphragm. But it did not kill him. He slipped from the bed, and seized
a stool to parry the next blow. Scoronconcolo now stabbed him in the
face, while Lorenzino forced him back upon the bed; and then began a
hideous struggle. In order to prevent his cries, Lorenzino doubled his
fist into the Duke's mouth. Alessandro seized the thumb between his
teeth, and held it in a vice until he died. This disabled Lorenzino, who
still lay upon his victim's body, and Scoronconcolo could not strike for
fear of wounding his master. Between the writhing couple he made,
however, several passes with his sword, which only pierced the
mattress. Then he drew a knife and drove it into the Duke's throat, and
bored about till he had severed veins and windpipe.
IV.--THE FLIGHT OF LORENZINO DE' MEDICI
Alessandro was dead. His body fell to earth. The two murderers,
drenched with blood, lifted it up, and placed it on the bed, wrapped in
the curtains, as they had found him first. Then Lorenzino went to the
window, which looked out upon the Via Larga, and opened it to rest
and breathe a little air. After this he called for Scoronconcolo's boy, Il
Freccia, and bade him look upon the dead man. Il Freccia recognised
the Duke. But why Lorenzino did this, no one knew. It seemed, as
Varchi says, that, having planned the murder with great ability, and
executed it with daring, his good sense and good luck forsook him. He
made no use of the crime he had committed; and from that day forward
till his own assassination, nothing prospered with him. Indeed, the
murder of Alessandro appears to have been almost motiveless,
considered from the point of view of practical politics. Varchi assumes
that Lorenzino's burning desire of glory prompted the deed; and when
he had acquired the notoriety he sought, there was an end to his
ambition. This view is confirmed by the Apology he wrote and
published for his act. It remains one of the most pregnant, bold, and
brilliant pieces of writing which we possess in favour of tyrannicide
from that epoch of insolent crime and audacious rhetoric. So energetic
is the style, and so biting the invective of this masterpiece, in which the
author stabs a second time his victim, that both Giordani and Leopardi
affirmed it to be the only true monument of eloquence in the Italian
language. If thirst for glory was Lorenzino's principal incentive,
immediate glory was his guerdon. He escaped that same night with
Scoronconcolo and Freccia to Bologna, where he stayed to dress his
thumb, and then passed forward to Venice. Filippo Strozzi there
welcomed him as the new Brutus, gave him money, and promised to
marry his two sons to the two sisters of the tyrant-killer. Poems were
written and published by the most famous men of letters, including
Benedetto Varchi and Francesco Maria Molsa, in praise of the Tuscan
Brutus, the liberator of his country from a tyrant. A bronze medal was
struck bearing his name, with a profile copied from Michelangelo's bust
of Brutus. On the obverse are two daggers and a cup, and the date viii.
id. Jan.
The immediate consequence of Alessandro's murder was the elevation
of Cosimo, son of Giovanni delle Bande Nere, and second cousin of
Lorenzino, to the duchy. At the ceremony of his investiture with the
ducal honours, Cosimo solemnly undertook to revenge Alessandro's
murder. In the following March he buried his predecessor with pomp in
San Lorenzo. The body was placed beside the bones of the Duke of
Urbino in the marble chest of Michelangelo, and here not many years
ago it was discovered. Soon afterwards Lorenzino was declared a rebel.
His portrait was painted according to old Tuscan precedent, head
downwards, and suspended by one foot, upon the wall of the fort built
by Alessandro. His house was cut in twain from roof to pavement, and
a narrow lane was driven through it, which received the title of Traitor's
Alley, Chiasso del Traditore. The price of four thousand golden florins
was put upon his head, together with the further sum of one hundred
florins per annum in perpetuity to be paid to the murderer and his direct
heirs in succession, by the Otto di Balia. Moreover, the man who killed
Lorenzino was to enjoy all civic privileges; exemption from all taxes,
ordinary and extraordinary; the right of carrying arms, together with
two attendants, in the city and the whole domain of Florence; and the
further prerogative of restoring ten outlaws at his choice. If Lorenzino
could be captured and brought alive to Florence, the whole of this
reward would be doubled.
This decree was promulgated in April 1537, and thenceforward
Lorenzino de' Medici lived a doomed man. The assassin, who had been
proclaimed a Brutus by Tuscan exiles and humanistic enthusiasts, was
regarded as a Judas by the common people. Ballads were written on
him with the title of the 'Piteous and sore lament made unto himself by
Lorenzino de' Medici, who murdered the most illustrious Duke
Alessandro.' He had become a wild beast, whom it was honourable to
hunt down, a pest which it was righteous to extirpate. Yet fate delayed
nine years to overtake him. What remains to be told about his story
must be extracted from the narrative of the bravo who succeeded, with
the aid of an accomplice, in despatching him at Venice.[13] So far as
possible, I shall use the man's own words, translating them literally, and
omitting only unimportant details. The narrative throws brilliant light
upon the manners and movements of professional cut-throats at that
period in Italy. It seems to have been taken down from the hero
Francesco, or Cecco, Bibboni's lips; and there is no doubt that we
possess in it a valuable historical document for the illustration of
contemporary customs. It offers in all points a curious parallel to
Cellini's account of his own homicides and hair-breadth escapes.
Moreover, it is confirmed in its minutest circumstances by the records
of the criminal courts of Venice in the sixteenth century. This I can
attest from recent examination of MSS. relating to the Signori di Notte
and the Esecutori contro la Bestemmia, which are preserved among the
Archives at the Frari.
V.--THE MURDER OF LORENZINO DE' MEDICI
'When I returned from Germany,' begins Bibboni, 'where I had been in
the pay of the Emperor, I found at Vicenza Bebo da Volterra, who was
staying in the house of M. Antonio da Roma, a nobleman of that city.
This gentleman employed him because of a great feud he had; and he
was mighty pleased, moreover, at my coming, and desired that I too
should take up my quarters in his palace.'
This paragraph strikes the keynote of the whole narrative, and
introduces us to the company we are about to keep. The noblemen of
that epoch, if they had private enemies, took into their service soldiers
of adventure, partly to protect their persons, but also to make war, when
occasion offered, on their foes. The bravi, as they were styled, had
quarters assigned them in the basement of the palace, where they might
be seen swaggering about the door or flaunting their gay clothes behind
the massive iron bars of the windows which opened on the streets.
When their master went abroad at night they followed him, and were
always at hand to perform secret services in love affairs, assassination,
and espial. For the rest, they haunted taverns, and kept up
correspondence with prostitutes. An Italian city had a whole population
of such fellows, the offscourings of armies, drawn from all nations,
divided by their allegiance of the time being into hostile camps, but
united by community of interest and occupation, and ready to combine
against the upper class, upon whose vices, enmities, and cowardice they
throve.
Bibboni proceeds to say how another gentleman of Vicenza, M.
Francesco Manente, had at this time a feud with certain of the Guazzi
and the Laschi, which had lasted several years, and cost the lives of
many members of both parties and their following. M. Francesco being
a friend of M. Antonio, besought that gentleman to lend him Bibboni
and Bebo for a season; and the two bravi went together with their new
master to Celsano, a village in the neighbourhood. 'There both parties
had estates, and all of them kept armed men in their houses, so that not
a day passed without feats of arms, and always there was some one
killed or wounded. One day, soon afterwards, the leaders of our party
resolved to attack the foe in their house, where we killed two, and the
rest, numbering five men, entrenched themselves in a ground-floor
apartment; whereupon we took possession of their harquebuses and
other arms, which forced them to abandon the villa and retire to
Vicenza; and within a short space of time this great feud was
terminated by an ample peace.' After this Bebo took service with the
Rector of the University in Padua, and was transferred by his new
patron to Milan. Bibboni remained at Vicenza with M. Galeazzo della
Seta, who stood in great fear of his life, notwithstanding the peace
which had been concluded between the two factions. At the end of ten
months he returned to M. Antonio da Roma and his six brothers, 'all of
whom being very much attached to me, they proposed that I should live
my life with them, for good or ill, and be treated as one of the family;
upon the understanding that if war broke out and I wanted to take part
in it, I should always have twenty-five crowns and arms and horse, with
welcome home, so long as I lived; and in case I did not care to join the
troops, the same provision for my maintenance.'
From these details we comprehend the sort of calling which a bravo of
Bibboni's species followed. Meanwhile Bebo was at Milan. 'There it
happened that M. Francesco Vinta, of Volterra, was on embassy from
the Duke of Florence. He saw Bebo, and asked him what he was doing
in Milan, and Bebo answered that he was a knight errant.' This phrase,
derived no doubt from the romantic epics then in vogue, was a pretty
euphemism for a rogue of Bebo's quality. The ambassador now began
cautiously to sound his man, who seems to have been outlawed from
the Tuscan duchy, telling him he knew a way by which he might return
with favour to his home, and at last disclosing the affair of Lorenzo.
Bebo was puzzled at first, but when he understood the matter, he
professed his willingness, took letters from the envoy to the Duke of
Florence, and, in a private audience with Cosimo, informed him that he
was ready to attempt Lorenzino's assassination. He added that 'he had a
comrade fit for such a job, whose fellow for the business could not
easily be found.'
Bebo now travelled to Vicenza, and opened the whole matter to
Bibboni, who weighed it well, and at last, being convinced that the
Duke's commission to his comrade was bona fide, determined to take
his share in the undertaking. The two agreed to have no accomplices.
They went to Venice, and 'I,' says Bibboni, 'being most intimately
acquainted with all that city, and provided there with many friends,
soon quietly contrived to know where Lorenzino lodged, and took a
room in the neighbourhood, and spent some days in seeing how we best
might rule our conduct.' Bibboni soon discovered that Lorenzino never
left his palace; and he therefore remained in much perplexity, until, by
good luck, Ruberto Strozzi arrived from France in Venice, bringing in
his train a Navarrese servant, who had the nickname of Spagnoletto.
This fellow was a great friend of the bravo. They met, and Bibboni told
him that he should like to go and kiss the hands of Messer Ruberto,
whom he had known in Rome. Strozzi inhabited the same palace as
Lorenzino. 'When we arrived there, both Messer Ruberto and Lorenzo
were leaving the house, and there were around them so many
gentlemen and other persons, that I could not present myself, and both
straightway stepped into the gondola. Then I, not having seen Lorenzo
for a long while past, and because he was very quietly attired, could not
recognise the man exactly, but only as it were between certainty and
doubt. Wherefore I said to Spagnoletto, "I think I know that gentleman,
but don't remember where I saw him." And Messer Ruberto was giving
him his right hand. Then Spagnoletto answered, "You know him well
enough; he is Messer Lorenzo. But see you tell this to nobody. He goes
by the name of Messer Dario, because he lives in great fear for his
safety, and people don't know that he is now in Venice." I answered
that I marvelled much, and if I could have helped him, would have
done so willingly. Then I asked where they were going, and he said, to
dine with Messer Giovanni della Casa, who was the Pope's Legate. I
did not leave the man till I had drawn from him all I required.'
Thus spoke the Italian Judas. The appearance of La Casa on the scene
is interesting. He was the celebrated author of the scandalous 'Capitolo
del Forno,' the author of many sublime and melancholy sonnets, who
was now at Venice, prosecuting a charge of heresy against Pier Paolo
Vergerio, and paying his addresses to a noble lady of the Quirini family.
It seems that on the territory of San Marco he made common cause
with the exiles from Florence, for he was himself by birth a Florentine,
and he had no objection to take Brutus-Lorenzino by the hand.
After the noblemen had rowed off in their gondola to dine with the
Legate, Bibboni and his friend entered their palace, where he found
another old acquaintance, the house-steward, or spenditore of Lorenzo.
From him he gathered much useful information. Pietro Strozzi, it seems,
had allowed the tyrannicide one thousand five hundred crowns a year,
with the keep of three brave and daring companions (tre compagni
bravi e facinorosi), and a palace worth fifty crowns on lease. But
Lorenzo had just taken another on the Campo di San Polo at three
hundred crowns a year, for which swagger (altura) Pietro Strozzi had
struck a thousand crowns off his allowance. Bibboni also learned that
he was keeping house with his uncle, Alessandro Soderini, another
Florentine outlaw, and that he was ardently in love with a certain
beautiful Barozza. This woman was apparently one of the grand
courtesans of Venice. He further ascertained the date when he was
going to move into the palace at San Polo, and, 'to put it briefly, knew
everything he did, and, as it were, how many times a day he spit.' Such
were the intelligences of the servants' hall, and of such value were they
to men of Bibboni's calling.
In the Carnival of 1546 Lorenzo meant to go masqued in the habit of a
gipsy woman to the square of San Spirito, where there was to be a joust.
Great crowds of people would assemble, and Bibboni hoped to do his
business there. The assassination, however, failed on this occasion, and
Lorenzo took up his abode in the palace he had hired upon the Campo
di San Polo. This Campo is one of the largest open places in Venice,
shaped irregularly, with a finely curving line upon the western side,
where two of the noblest private houses in the city are still standing.
Nearly opposite these, in the south-western angle, stands, detached, the
little old church of San Polo. One of its side entrances opens upon the
square; the other on a lane, which leads eventually to the Frari. There is
nothing in Bibboni's narrative to make it clear where Lorenzo hired his
dwelling. But it would seem from certain things which he says later on,
that in order to enter the church his victim had to cross the square.
Meanwhile Bibboni took the precaution of making friends with a
shoemaker, whose shop commanded the whole Campo, including
Lorenzo's palace. In this shop he began to spend much of his time; 'and
oftentimes I feigned to be asleep; but God knows whether I was
sleeping, for my mind, at any rate, was wide-awake.'
A second convenient occasion for murdering Lorenzo soon seemed to
offer. He was bidden to dine with Monsignor della Casa; and Bibboni,
putting a bold face on, entered the Legate's palace, having left Bebo
below in the loggia, fully resolved to do the business. 'But we found,'
he says, 'that, they had gone to dine at Murano, so that we remained
with our tabors in their bag.' The island of Murano at that period was a
favourite resort of the Venetian nobles, especially of the more literary
and artistic, who kept country-houses there, where they enjoyed the
fresh air of the lagoons and the quiet of their gardens.
The third occasion, after all these weeks of watching, brought success
to Bibboni's schemes. He had observed how Lorenzo occasionally so
far broke his rules of caution as to go on foot, past the church of San
Polo, to visit the beautiful Barozza; and he resolved, if possible, to
catch him on one of these journeys. 'It so chanced on the 28th of
February, which was the second Sunday of Lent, that having gone, as
was my wont, to pry out whether Lorenzo would give orders for going
abroad that day, I entered the shoemaker's shop, and stayed awhile,
until Lorenzo came to the window with a napkin round his neck for he
was combing his hair--and at the same moment I saw a certain Giovan
Battista Martelli, who kept his sword for the defence of Lorenzo's
person, enter and come forth again. Concluding that they would
probably go abroad, I went home to get ready and procure the
necessary weapons, and there I found Bebo asleep in bed, and made
him get up at once, and we came to our accustomed post of observation,
by the church of San Polo, where our men would have to pass.' Bibboni
now retired to his friend the shoemaker's, and Bebo took up his station
at one of the side-doors of San Polo; 'and, as good luck would have it,
Giovan Battista Martelli came forth, and walked a piece in front, and
then Lorenzo came, and then Alessandro Soderini, going the one
behind the other, like storks, and Lorenzo, on entering the church, and
lifting up the curtain of the door, was seen from the opposite door by
Bebo, who at the same time noticed how I had left the shop, and so we
met upon the street as we had agreed, and he told me that Lorenzo was
inside the church.'
To any one who knows the Campo di San Polo, it will be apparent that
Lorenzo had crossed from the western side of the piazza and entered
the church by what is technically called its northern door. Bebo,
stationed at the southern door, could see him when he pushed the heavy
stoia or leather curtain aside, and at the same time could observe
Bibboni's movements in the cobbler's shop. Meanwhile Lorenzo
walked across the church and came to the same door where Bebo had
been standing. 'I saw him issue from the church and take the main street;
then came Alessandro Soderini, and I walked last of all; and when we
reached the point we had determined on, I jumped in front of
Alessandro with the poignard in my hand, crying, "Hold hard,
Alessandro, and get along with you in God's name, for we are not here
for you!" He then threw himself around my waist, and grasped my arms,
and kept on calling out. Seeing how wrong I had been to try to spare his
life, I wrenched myself as well as I could from his grip, and with my
lifted poignard struck him, as God willed, above the eyebrow, and a
little blood trickled from the wound. He, in high fury, gave me such a
thrust that I fell backward, and the ground besides was slippery from
having rained a little. Then Alessandro drew his sword, which he
carried in its scabbard, and thrust at me in front, and struck me on the
corslet, which for my good fortune was of double mail. Before I could
get ready I received three passes, which, had I worn a doublet instead
of that mailed corslet, would certainly have run me through. At the
fourth pass I had regained my strength and spirit, and closed with him,
and stabbed him four times in the head, and being so close he could not
use his sword, but tried to parry with his hand and hilt, and I, as God
willed, struck him at the wrist below the sleeve of mail, and cut his
hand off clean, and gave him then one last stroke on his head.
Thereupon he begged for God's sake spare his life, and I, in trouble
about Bebo, left him in the arms of a Venetian nobleman, who held him
back from jumping into the canal.'
Who this Venetian nobleman, found unexpectedly upon the scene, was,
does not appear. Nor, what is still more curious, do we hear anything of
that Martelli, the bravo, 'who kept his sword for the defence of
Lorenzo's person.' The one had arrived accidentally, it seems. The other
must have been a coward and escaped from the scuffle.
'When I turned,' proceeds Bibboni, 'I found Lorenzo on his knees. He
raised himself, and I, in anger, gave him a great cut across the head,
which split it in two pieces, and laid him at my feet, and he never rose
again.'
VI.--THE ESCAPE OF THE BRAVI
Bebo, meanwhile, had made off from the scene of action. And Bibboni,
taking to his heels, came up with him in the little square of San
Marcello. They now ran for their lives till they reached the traghetto di
San Spirito, where they threw their poignards into the water,
remembering that no man might carry these in Venice under penalty of
the galleys. Bibboni's white hose were drenched with blood. He
therefore agreed to separate from Bebo, having named a rendezvous.
Left alone, his ill luck brought him face to face with twenty constables
(sbirri). 'In a moment I conceived that they knew everything, and were
come to capture me, and of a truth I saw that it was over with me. As
swiftly as I could I quickened pace and got into a church, near to which
was the house of a Compagnia, and the one opened into the other, and
knelt down and prayed, commending myself with fervour to God for
my deliverance and safety. Yet while I prayed, I kept my eyes well
open and saw the whole band pass the church, except one man who
entered, and I strained my sight so that I seemed to see behind as well
as in front, and then it was I longed for my poignard, for I should not
have heeded being in a church.' But the constable, it soon appeared,
was not looking for Bibboni. So he gathered up his courage, and ran for
the Church of San Spirito, where the Padre Andrea Volterrano was
preaching to a great congregation. He hoped to go in by one door and
out by the other, but the crowd prevented him, and he had to turn back
and face the sbirrí. One of them followed him, having probably caught
sight of the blood upon his hose. Then Bibboni resolved to have done
with the fellow, and rushed at him, and flung him down with his head
upon the pavement, and ran like mad and came at last, all out of breath,
to San Marco. It seems clear that before Bibboni separated from Bebo
they had crossed the water, for the Sestiere di San Polo is separated
from the Sestiere di San Marco by the Grand Canal. And this they must
have done at the traghetto di San Spirito. Neither the church nor the
traghetto are now in existence, and this part of the story is therefore
obscure.[14] Having reached San Marco, he took a gondola at the Ponte
della Paglia, where tourists are now wont to stand and contemplate the
Ducal Palace and the Bridge of Sighs. First, he sought the house of a
woman of the town who was his friend; then changed purpose, and
rowed to the palace of the Count Salici da Collalto. 'He was a great
friend and intimate of ours, because Bebo and I had done him many
and great services in times passed. There I knocked; and Bebo opened
the door, and when he saw me dabbled with blood, he marvelled that I
had not come to grief and fallen into the hands of justice, and, indeed,
had feared as much because I had remained so long away.' It appears,
therefore, that the Palazzo Collalto was their rendezvous. 'The Count
was from home; but being known to all his people, I played the master
and went into the kitchen to the fire, and with soap and water turned
my hose, which had been white, to a grey colour.' This is a very
delicate way of saying that he washed out the blood of Alessandro and
Lorenzo!
Soon after the Count returned, and 'lavished caresses' upon Bebo and
his precious comrade. They did not tell him what they had achieved
that morning, but put him off with a story of having settled a sbirro in a
quarrel about a girl. Then the Count invited them to dinner; and being
himself bound to entertain the first physician of Venice, requested them
to take it in an upper chamber. He and his secretary served them with
their own hands at table. When the physician arrived, the Count went
downstairs; and at this moment a messenger came from Lorenzo's
mother, begging the doctor to go at once to San Polo, for that her son
had been murdered and Soderini wounded to the death. It was now no
longer possible to conceal their doings from the Count, who told them
to pluck up courage and abide in patience. He had himself to dine and
take his siesta, and then to attend a meeting of the Council.
About the hour of vespers, Bibboni determined to seek better refuge.
Followed at a discreet distance by Bebo, he first called at their lodgings
and ordered supper. Two priests came in and fell into conversation with
them. But something in the behaviour of one of these good men roused
his suspicions. So they left the house, took a gondola, and told the man
to row hard to S. Maria Zobenigo. On the way he bade him put them on
shore, paid him well, and ordered him to wait for them. They landed
near the palace of the Spanish embassy; and here Bibboni meant to
seek sanctuary. For it must be remembered that the houses of
ambassadors, no less than of princes of the Church, were inviolable.
They offered the most convenient harbouring-places to rascals. Charles
V., moreover, was deeply interested in the vengeance taken on
Alessandro de' Medici's murderer, for his own natural daughter was
Alessandro's widow and Duchess of Florence. In the palace they were
met with much courtesy by about forty Spaniards, who showed
considerable curiosity, and told them that Lorenzo and Alessandro
Soderini had been murdered that morning by two men whose
description answered to their appearance. Bibboni put their questions
by and asked to see the ambassador. He was not at home. In that case,
said Bibboni, take us to the secretary. Attended by some thirty
Spaniards, 'with great joy and gladness,' they were shown into the
secretary's chamber. He sent the rest of the folk away, 'and locked the
door well, and then embraced and kissed us before we had said a word,
and afterwards bade us talk freely without any fear.' When Bibboni had
told the whole story, he was again embraced and kissed by the secretary,
who thereupon left them and went to the private apartment of the
ambassador. Shortly after he returned and led them by a winding
staircase into the presence of his master. The ambassador greeted them
with great honour, told them he would strain all the power of the
empire to hand them in safety over to Duke Cosimo, and that he had
already sent a courier to the Emperor with the good news.
So they remained in hiding in the Spanish embassy; and in ten days'
time commands were received from Charles himself that everything
should be done to convey them safely to Florence. The difficulty was
how to smuggle them out of Venice, where the police of the Republic
were on watch, and Florentine outlaws were mounting guard on sea and
shore to catch them. The ambassador began by spreading reports on the
Rialto every morning of their having been seen at Padua, at Verona, in
Friuli. He then hired a palace at Malghera, near Mestre, and went out
daily with fifty Spaniards, and took carriage or amused himself with
horse exercise and shooting. The Florentines, who were on watch,
could only discover from his people that he did this for amusement.
When he thought that he had put them sufficiently off their guard, the
ambassador one day took Bibboni and Bebo out by Canaregio and
Mestre to Malghera, concealed in his own gondola, with the whole
train of Spaniards in attendance. And though, on landing, the
Florentines challenged them, they durst not interfere with an
ambassador or come to battle with his men. So Bebo and Bibboni were
hustled into a coach, and afterwards provided with two comrades and
four horses. They rode for ninety miles without stopping to sleep, and
on the day following this long journey reached Trento, having probably
threaded the mountain valleys above Bassano, for Bibboni speaks of a
certain village where the people talked half German. The Imperial
Ambassador at Trento forwarded them next day to Mantua; from
Mantua they came to Piacenza; thence, passing through the valley of
the Taro, crossing the Apennines at Cisa, descending on Pontremoli,
and reaching Pisa at night, the fourteenth day after their escape from
Venice.
When they arrived at Pisa, Duke Cosimo was supping. So they went to
an inn, and next morning presented themselves to his Grace. Cosimo
received them kindly, assured them of his gratitude, confirmed them in
the enjoyment of their rewards and privileges, and swore that they
might rest secure of his protection in all parts of his dominion. We may
imagine how the men caroused together after this reception. As
Bibboni adds, 'We were now able for the whole time of life left us to
live splendidly, without a thought or care.' The last words of his
narrative are these: 'Bebo from Pisa, at what date I know not, went
home to Volterra, his native town, and there finished his days; while I
abode in Florence, where I have had no further wish to hear of wars,
but to live my life in holy peace.'
So ends the story of the two bravi. We have reason to believe, from
some contemporary documents which Cantù has brought to light, that
Bibboni exaggerated his own part in the affair. Luca Martelli, writing
to Varchi, says that it was Bebo who clove Lorenzo's skull with a
cutlass. He adds this curious detail, that the weapons of both men were
poisoned, and that the wound inflicted by Bibboni on Soderini's hand
was a slight one. Yet, the poignard being poisoned, Soderini died of it.
In other respects Martelli's brief account agrees with that given by
Bibboni, who probably did no more, his comrade being dead, than
claim for himself, at some expense of truth, the lion's share of their
heroic action.
VII.--LORENZINO BRUTUS
It remains to ask ourselves, What opinion can be justly formed of
Lorenzino's character and motives? When he murdered his cousin, was
he really actuated by the patriotic desire to rid his country of a monster?
Did he imitate the Roman Brutus in the noble spirit of his predecessors,
Olgiati and Boscoli, martyrs to the creed of tyrannicide? Or must this
crowning action of a fretful life be explained, like his previous
mutilation of the statues on the Arch of Constantine, by a wild thirst for
notoriety? Did he hope that the exiles would return to Florence, and
that he would enjoy an honourable life, an immortality of glorious
renown? Did envy for his cousin's greatness and resentment of his
undisguised contempt--the passions of one who had been used for vile
ends--conscious of self-degradation and the loss of honour, yet mindful
of his intellectual superiority--did these emotions take fire in him and
mingle with a scholar's reminiscences of antique heroism, prompting
him to plan a deed which should at least assume the show of patriotic
zeal, and prove indubitable courage in its perpetrator? Did he, again,
perhaps imagine, being next in blood to Alessandro and direct heir to
the ducal crown by the Imperial Settlement of 1530, that the city would
elect her liberator for her ruler? Alfieri and Niccolini, having taken, as
it were, a brief in favour of tyrannicide, praised Lorenzino as a hero. De
Musset, who wrote a considerable drama on his story, painted him as a
roué corrupted by society, enfeebled by circumstance, soured by
commerce with an uncongenial world, who hides at the bottom of his
mixed nature enough of real nobility to make him the leader of a
forlorn hope for the liberties of Florence. This is the most favourable
construction we can put upon Lorenzo's conduct. Yet some facts of the
case warn us to suspend our judgment. He seems to have formed no
plan for the liberation of his fellow-citizens. He gave no pledge of
self-devotion by avowing his deed and abiding by its issues. He showed
none of the qualities of a leader, whether in the cause of freedom or of
his own dynastic interests, after the murder. He escaped as soon as he
was able, as secretly as he could manage, leaving the city in confusion,
and exposing himself to the obvious charge of abominable treason. So
far as the Florentines knew, his assassination of their Duke was but a
piece of private spite, executed with infernal craft. It is true that when
he seized the pen in exile, he did his best to claim the guerdon of a
patriot, and to throw the blame of failure on the Florentines. In his
Apology, and in a letter written to Francesco de' Medici, he taunts them
with lacking the spirit to extinguish tyranny when he had slain the
tyrant. He summons plausible excuses to his aid--the impossibility of
taking persons of importance into his confidence, the loss of blood he
suffered from his wound, the uselessness of rousing citizens whom
events proved over-indolent for action. He declares that he has nothing
to regret. Having proved by deeds his will to serve his country, he has
saved his life in order to spend it for her when occasion offered. But
these arguments, invented after the catastrophe, these words, so bravely
penned when action ought to have confirmed his resolution, do not
meet the case. It was no deed of a true hero to assassinate a despot,
knowing or half knowing that the despot's subjects would immediately
elect another. Their languor could not, except rhetorically, be advanced
in defence of his own flight.
The historian is driven to seek both the explanation and palliation of
Lorenzo's failure in the temper of his times. There was enough daring
left in Florence to carry through a plan of brilliant treason, modelled on
an antique Roman tragedy. But there was not moral force in the
protagonist to render that act salutary, not public energy sufficient in
his fellow-citizens to accomplish his drama of deliverance. Lorenzo
was corrupt. Florence was flaccid. Evil manners had emasculated the
hero. In the state the last spark of independence had expired with
Ferrucci.
Still I have not without forethought dubbed this man a Cinque Cento
Brutus. Like much of the art and literature of his century, his action
may be regarded as a bizarre imitation of the antique manner. Without
the force and purpose of a Roman, Lorenzo set himself to copy
Plutarch's men--just as sculptors carved Neptunes and Apollos without
the dignity and serenity of the classic style. The antique faith was
wanting to both murderer and craftsman in those days. Even as
Renaissance work in art is too often aimless, decorative, vacant of
intention, so Lorenzino's Brutus tragedy seems but the snapping of a
pistol in void air. He had the audacity but not the ethical consistency of
his crime. He played the part of Brutus like a Roscius, perfect in its
histrionic details. And it doubtless gave to this skilful actor a supreme
satisfaction--salving over many wounds of vanity, quenching the
poignant thirst for things impossible and draughts of fame--that he
could play it on no mimic stage, but on the theatre of Europe. The
weakness of his conduct was the central weakness of his age and
country. Italy herself lacked moral purpose, sense of righteous
necessity, that consecration of self to a noble cause, which could alone
have justified Lorenzo's perfidy. Confused memories of Judith, Jael,
Brutus, and other classical tyrannicides, exalted his imagination.
Longing for violent emotions, jaded with pleasure which had palled,
discontented with his wasted life, jealous of his brutal cousin,
appetitive to the last of glory, he conceived his scheme. Having
conceived, he executed it with that which never failed in Cinque Cento
Italy--the artistic spirit of perfection. When it was over, he shrugged his
shoulders, wrote his magnificent Apology with a style of adamant upon
a plate of steel, and left it for the outlaws of Filippo Strozzi's faction to
deal with the crisis he had brought about. For some years he dragged
out an ignoble life in obscurity, and died at last, as Varchi puts it, more
by his own carelessness than by the watchful animosity of others. Over
the wild, turbid, clever, incomprehensible, inconstant hero-artist's grave
we write our Requiescat. Clio, as she takes the pen in hand to record
this prayer, smiles disdainfully and turns to graver business.
*****
TWO DRAMATISTS OF THE LAST CENTURY
There are few contrasts more striking than that which is presented by
the memoirs of Goldoni and Alfieri. Both of these men bore names
highly distinguished in the history of Italian literature. Both of them
were framed by nature with strongly marked characters, and fitted to
perform a special work in the world. Both have left behind them
records of their lives and literary labours, singularly illustrative of their
peculiar differences. There is no instance in which we see more clearly
the philosophical value of autobiographies, than in these vivid pictures
which the great Italian tragedian and comic author have delineated.
Some of the most interesting works of Lionardo da Vinci, Giorgione,
Albert Dürer, Rembrandt, Rubens, and Andrea del Sarto, are their
portraits painted by themselves. These pictures exhibit not only the
lineaments of the masters, but also their art. The hand which drew them
was the hand which drew the 'Last Supper,' or the 'Madonna of the
Tribune:' colour, method, chiaroscuro, all that makes up manner in
painting, may be studied on the same canvas as that which faithfully
represents the features of the man whose genius gave his style its
special character. We seem to understand the clear calm majesty of
Lionardo's manner, the silver-grey harmonies and smooth facility of
Andrea's Madonnas, the better for looking at their faces drawn by their
own hands at Florence. And if this be the case with a dumb picture,
how far higher must be the interest and importance of the written life of
a known author! Not only do we recognise in its composition the style
and temper and habits of thought which are familiar to us in his other
writings; but we also hear from his own lips how these were formed,
how his tastes took their peculiar direction, what circumstances acted
on his character, what hopes he had, and where he failed. Even should
his autobiography not bear the marks of uniform candour, it probably
reveals more of the actual truth, more of the man's real nature in its
height and depth, than any memoir written by friend or foe. Its
unconscious admissions, its general spirit, and the inferences which we
draw from its perusal, are far more valuable than any mere statement of
facts or external analysis, however scientific. When we become
acquainted with the series of events which led to the conception or
attended the production of some masterpiece of literature, a new light is
thrown upon its beauties, fresh life bursts forth from every chapter, and
we seem to have a nearer and more personal interest in its success.
What a powerful sensation, for instance, is that which we experience
when, after studying the 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,'
Gibbon tells us how the thought of writing it came to him upon the
Capitol, among the ruins of dead Rome, and within hearing of the
mutter of the monks of Ara Coeli, and how he finished it one night by
Lake Geneva, and laid his pen down and walked forth and saw the stars
above his terrace at Lausanne!
The memoirs of Alfieri and Goldoni are not deficient in any of the
characteristics of good autobiography. They seem to bear upon their
face the stamp of truthfulness, they illustrate their authors' lives with
marvellous lucidity, and they are full of interest as stories. But it is to
the contrast which they present that our attention should be chiefly
drawn. Other biographies may be as interesting and amusing. None
show in a more marked manner two distinct natures endowed with
genius for one art, and yet designed in every possible particular for
different branches of that art. Alfieri embodies Tragedy; Goldoni is the
spirit of Comedy. They are both Italians: their tragedies and comedies
are by no means cosmopolitan; but this national identity of character
only renders more remarkable the individual divergences by which they
were impelled into their different paths. Thalia seems to have made the
one, body, soul, and spirit; and Melpomene the other; each goddess
launched her favourite into circumstances suited to the evolution of his
genius, and presided over his development, so that at his death she
might exclaim,--Behold the living model of my Art!
Goldoni was born at Venice in the year 1707; he had already reached
celebrity when Alfieri saw the light for the first time, in 1749, at Asti.
Goldoni's grandfather was a native of Modena, who had settled in
Venice, and there lived with the prodigality of a rich and ostentatious
'bourgeois.' 'Amid riot and luxury did I enter the world,' says the poet,
after enumerating the banquets and theatrical displays with which the
old Goldoni entertained his guests in his Venetian palace and
country-house. Venice at that date was certainly the proper birthplace
for a comic poet. The splendour of the Renaissance had thoroughly
habituated her nobles to pleasures of the sense, and had enervated their
proud, maritime character, while the great name of the republic robbed
them of the caution for which they used to be conspicuous. Yet the real
strength of Venice was almost spent, and nothing remained but outward
insolence and prestige. Everything was gay about Goldoni in his
earliest childhood. Puppet-shows were built to amuse him by his
grandfather. 'My mother,' he says, 'took charge of my education, and
my father of my amusements.' Let us turn to the opening scene in
Alfieri's life, and mark the difference. A father above sixty, 'noble,
wealthy, and respectable,' who died before his son had reached the age
of one year old. A mother devoted to religion, the widow of one
marquis, and after the death of a second husband, Alfieri's father,
married for the third time to a nobleman of ancient birth. These were
Alfieri's parents. He was born in a solemn palazzo in the country town
of Asti, and at the age of five already longed for death as an escape
from disease and other earthly troubles. So noble and so wealthy was
the youthful poet that an abbé was engaged to carry out his education,
but not to teach him more than a count should know. Except this
worthy man he had no companions whatever. Strange ideas possessed
the boy. He ruminated on his melancholy, and when eight years old
attempted suicide. At this age he was sent to the academy at Turin,
attended, as befitted a lad of his rank, by a man-servant, who was to
remain and wait on him at school. Alfieri stayed here several years
without revisiting his home, tyrannised over by the valet who added to
his grandeur, constantly subject to sickness, and kept in almost total
ignorance by his incompetent preceptors. The gloom and pride and
stoicism of his temperament were augmented by this unnatural
discipline. His spirit did not break, but took a haughtier and more
disdainful tone. He became familiar with misfortunes. He learned to
brood over and intensify his passions. Every circumstance of his life
seemed strung up to a tragic pitch. This at least is the impression which
remains upon our mind after reading in his memoirs the narrative of
what must in many of its details have been a common schoolboy's life
at that time.
Meanwhile, what had become of young Goldoni? His boyhood was as
thoroughly plebeian, various, and comic as Alfieri's had been patrician,
monotonous, and tragical. Instead of one place of residence, we read of
twenty. Scrape succeeds to scrape, adventure to adventure. Knowledge
of the world, and some book learning also, flow in upon the boy, and
are eagerly caught up by him and heterogeneously amalgamated in his
mind. Alfieri learned nothing, wrote nothing, in his youth, and heard
his parents say--'A nobleman need never strive to be a doctor of the
faculties.' Goldoni had a little medicine and much law thrust upon him.
At eight he wrote a comedy, and ere long began to read the plays of
Plautus, Terence, Aristophanes, and Machiavelli. Between the nature of
the two poets there was a marked and characteristic difference as to
their mode of labour and of acquiring knowledge. Both of them loved
fame, and wrought for it; but Alfieri did so from a sense of pride and a
determination to excel; while Goldoni loved the approbation of his
fellows, sought their compliments, and basked in the sunshine of smiles.
Alfieri wrote with labour. Each tragedy he composed went through a
triple process of composition, and received frequent polishing when
finished. Goldoni dashed off his pieces with the greatest ease on every
possible subject. He once produced sixteen comedies in one theatrical
season. Alfieri's were like lion's whelps--brought forth with difficulty,
and at long intervals; Goldoni's, like the brood of a hare--many,
frequent, and as agile as their parent. Alfieri amassed knowledge
scrupulously, but with infinite toil. He mastered Greek and Hebrew
when he was past forty. Goldoni never gave himself the least trouble to
learn anything, but trusted to the ready wit, good memory, and natural
powers, which helped him in a hundred strange emergencies. Power of
will and pride sustained the one; facility and a good-humoured vanity
the other. This contrast was apparent at a very early age. We have seen
how Alfieri passed his time at Turin, in a kind of aristocratic prison of
educational ignorance. Goldoni's grandfather died when he was five
years old, and left his family in great embarrassment. The poet's father
went off to practise medicine at Perugia. His son followed him,
acquired the rudiments of knowledge in that town, and then proceeded
to study philosophy alone at Rimini. There was no man-servant or
academy in his case. He was far too plebeian and too free. The boy
lodged with a merchant, and got some smattering of Thomas Aquinas
and the Peripatetics into his small brain, while he contrived to form a
friendship with an acting company. They were on the wing for Venice
in a coasting boat, which would touch at Chiozza, where Goldoni's
mother then resided. The boy pleased them. Would he like the voyage?
This offer seemed too tempting, and away he rushed, concealed himself
on board, and made one of a merry motley shipload. 'Twelve persons,
actors as well as actresses, a prompter, a machinist, a storekeeper, eight
domestics, four chambermaids, two nurses, children of every age, cats,
dogs, monkeys, parrots, birds, pigeons, and a lamb; it was another
Noah's ark.' The young poet felt at home; how could a comic poet feel
otherwise? They laughed, they sang, they danced; they ate and drank,
and played at cards. 'Macaroni! Every one fell on it, and three dishes
were devoured. We had also alamode beef, cold fowl, a loin of veal, a
dessert, and excellent wine. What a charming dinner! No cheer like a
good appetite.' Their harmony, however, was disturbed. The 'première
amoureuse,' who, in spite of her rank and title, was ugly and cross, and
required to be coaxed with cups of chocolate, lost her cat. She tried to
kill the whole boat-load of beasts--cats, dogs, monkeys, parrots,
pigeons, even the lamb stood in danger of her wrath. A regular quarrel
ensued, was somehow set at peace, and all began to laugh again. This is
a sample of Goldoni's youth. Comic pleasures, comic dangers; nothing
deep or lasting, but light and shadow cheerfully distributed, clouds
lowering with storm, a distant growl of thunder, then a gleam of light
and sunshine breaking overhead. He gets articled to an attorney at
Venice, then goes to study law at Pavia; studies society instead, and
flirts, and finally is expelled for writing satires. Then he takes a turn at
medicine with his father in Friuli, and acts as clerk to the criminal
chancellor at Chiozza.
Every employment seems easy to him, but he really cares for none but
literature. He spends all his spare time in reading and in amusements,
and begins to write a tragic opera. This proves, however, eminently
unsuccessful, and he burns it in a comic fit of anger. One laughable
love-affair in which he engaged at Udine exhibits his adventures in
their truly comic aspect. It reminds us of the scene in 'Don Giovanni,'
where Leporello personates the Don and deceives Donna Elvira.
Goldoni had often noticed a beautiful young lady at church and on the
public drives: she was attended by a waiting-maid, who soon perceived
that her mistress had excited the young man's admiration, and who
promised to befriend him in his suit. Goldoni was told to repair at night
to the palace of his mistress, and to pour his passion forth beneath her
window. Impatiently he waited for the trysting hour, conned his
love-sentences, and gloried in the romance of the adventure. When
night came, he found the window, and a veiled figure of a lady in the
moonlight, whom he supposed at once to be his mistress. Her he
eloquently addressed in the true style of Romeo's rapture, and she
answered him. Night after night this happened, but sometimes he was a
little troubled by a sound of ill-suppressed laughter interrupting the
tête-à-tête. Meanwhile Teresa, the waiting-maid, received from his
hands costly presents for her mistress, and made him promises on her
part in exchange. As she proved unable to fulfil them, Goldoni grew
suspicious, and at last discovered that the veiled figure to whom he had
poured out his tale of love was none other than Teresa, and that the
laughter had proceeded from her mistress, whom the faithless
waiting-maid regaled at her lover's expense. Thus ended this ridiculous
matter. Goldoni was not, however, cured by his experience. One other
love-affair rendered Udine too hot to hold him, and in consequence of a
third he had to fly from Venice just when he was beginning to flourish
there. At length he married comfortably and suitably, settling down into
a quiet life with a woman whom, if he did not love her with passion, he
at least respected and admired. Goldoni, in fact, had no real passion in
his nature.
Alfieri, on the other hand, was given over to volcanic ebullitions of the
most ungovernable hate and affection, joy and sorrow. The chains of
love which Goldoni courted so willingly, Alfieri regarded with the
greatest shyness. But while Goldoni healed his heart of all its bruises in
a week or so, the tragic poet bore about him wounds that would not
close. He enumerates three serious passions which possessed his whole
nature, and at times deprived him almost of his reason. A Dutch lady
first won his heart, and when he had to leave her, Alfieri suffered so
intensely that he never opened his lips during the course of a long
journey through Germany, Switzerland, and Piedmont. Fevers, and
suicides attempted but interrupted, marked the termination of this tragic
amour. His second passion had for its object an English lady, with
whose injured husband he fought a duel, although his collarbone was
broken at the time. The lady proved unworthy of Alfieri as well as of
her husband, and the poet left her in a most deplorable state of
hopelessness and intellectual prostration. At last he formed a permanent
affection for the wife of Prince Charles Edward, the Countess of
Albany, in close friendship with whom he lived after her husband's
death. The society of this lady gave him perfect happiness; but it was
founded on her lofty beauty, the pathos of her situation, and her
intellectual qualities. Melpomene presided at this union, while Thalia
blessed the nuptials of Goldoni. How characteristic also were the
adventures which these two pairs of lovers encountered! Goldoni once
carried his wife upon his back across two rivers in their flight from the
Spanish to the Austrian camp at Rimini, laughing and groaning, and
perceiving the humour of his situation all the time. Alfieri, on an
occasion of even greater difficulty, was stopped with his illustrious
friend at the gates of Paris in 1792. They were flying in post-chaises,
with their servants and their baggage, from the devoted city, when a
troop of sansculottes rushed on them, surged around the carriage, called
them aristocrats, and tried to drag them off to prison. Alfieri, with his
tall gaunt figure, pallid face, and red voluminous hair, stormed, raged,
and raised his deep bass voice above the tumult. For half an hour he
fought with them, then made his coachmen gallop through the gates,
and scarcely halted till they got to Gravelines. By this prompt
movement they escaped arrest and death at Paris. These two scenes
would make agreeable companion pictures: Goldoni staggering beneath
his wife across the muddy bed of an Italian stream--the smiling writer
of agreeable plays, with his half-tearful helpmate ludicrous in her
disasters; Alfieri mad with rage among Parisian Mænads, his princess
quaking in her carriage, the air hoarse with cries, and death and safety
trembling in the balance. It is no wonder that the one man wrote 'La
Donna di Garbo' and the 'Cortese Veneziano,' while the other was
inditing essays on Tyranny and dramas of 'Antigone,' 'Timoleon,' and
'Brutus.'
The difference between the men is seen no less remarkably in regard to
courage. Alfieri was a reckless rider, and astonished even English
huntsmen by his desperate leaps. In one of them he fell and broke his
collar-bone, but not the less he held his tryst with a fair lady, climbed
her park gates, and fought a duel with her husband. Goldoni was a
pantaloon for cowardice. In the room of an inn at Desenzano which he
occupied together with a female fellow-traveller, an attempt was made
to rob them by a thief at night. All Goldoni was able to do consisted in
crying out for help, and the lady called him 'M. l'Abbé' ever after for
his want of pluck. Goldoni must have been by far the more agreeable of
the two. In all his changes from town to town of Italy he found
amusement and brought gaiety. The sights, the theatres, the society
aroused his curiosity. He trembled with excitement at the performance
of his pieces, made friends with the actors, taught them, and wrote parts
to suit their qualities. At Pisa he attended as a stranger the meeting of
the Arcadian Academy, and at its close attracted all attention to himself
by his clever improvisation. He was in truth a ready-witted man, pliable,
full of resource, bred half a valet, half a Roman græculus. Alfieri saw
more of Europe than Goldoni. France, Germany, Holland, Switzerland,
England, Spain, all parts of Italy he visited with restless haste. From
land to land he flew, seeking no society, enjoying nothing, dashing
from one inn door to another with his servants and his carriages, and
thinking chiefly of the splendid stud of horses which he took about with
him upon his travels. He was a lonely, stiff, self-engrossed, indomitable
man. He could not rest at home: he could not bear to be the vassal of a
king and breathe the air of courts. So he lived always on the wing, and
ended by exiling himself from Sardinia in order to escape the trammels
of paternal government. As for his tragedies, he wrote them to win
laurels from posterity. He never cared to see them acted; he bullied
even his printers and correctors; he cast a glove down in defiance of his
critics. Goldoni sought the smallest meed of approbation. It pleased
him hugely in his old age to be Italian master to a French princess.
Alfieri openly despised the public. Goldoni wrote because he liked to
write; Alfieri, for the sake of proving his superior powers. Against
Alfieri's hatred of Turin and its trivial solemnities, we have to set
Goldoni's love of Venice and its petty pleasures. He would willingly
have drunk chocolate and played at dominoes or picquet all his life on
the Piazza di San Marco, when Alfieri was crossing the sierras on his
Andalusian horse, and devouring a frugal meal of rice in solitude.
Goldoni glided through life an easy man, with genial, venial thoughts;
with a clear, gay, gentle temper; a true sense of what is good and just;
and a heart that loved diffusively, if not too warmly. Many were the
checks and obstacles thrown on his path; but round them or above them
he passed nimbly, without scar or scathe. Poverty went close behind
him, but he kept her off, and never felt the pinch of need. Alfieri
strained and strove against the barriers of fate; a sombre, rugged man,
proud, candid, and self-confident, who broke or bent all opposition;
now moving solemnly with tragic pomp, now dashing passionately
forward by the might of will. Goldoni drew his inspirations from the
moment and surrounding circumstances. Alfieri pursued an ideal,
slowly formed, but strongly fashioned and resolutely followed. Of
wealth he had plenty and to spare, but he disregarded it, and was a
Stoic in his mode of life. He was an unworldly man, and hated
worldliness. Goldoni, but for his authorship, would certainly have
grown a prosperous advocate, and died of gout in Venice. Goldoni
liked smart clothes; Alfieri went always in black. Goldoni's fits of
spleen--for he was melancholy now and then--lasted a day or two, and
disappeared before a change of place. Alfieri dragged his discontent
about with him all over Europe, and let it interrupt his work and mar
his intellect for many months together. Alfieri was a patriot, and hated
France. Goldoni never speaks of politics, and praises Paris as a heaven
on earth. The genial moralising of the latter appears childish by the side
of Alfieri's terse philosophy and pregnant remarks on the development
of character. What suits the page of Plautus would look poor in
'Oedipus' or 'Agamemnon.' Goldoni's memoirs are diffuse and flippant
in their light French dress. They seem written to please. Alfieri's Italian
style marches with dignity and Latin terseness. He rarely condescends
to smile. He writes to instruct the world and to satisfy himself. Grim
humour sometimes flashes out, as when he tells the story of the Order
of Homer, which he founded. How different from Goldoni's naïve
account of his little ovation in the theatre at Paris!
But it would be idle to carry on this comparison, already tedious. The
life of Goldoni was one long scene of shifts and jests, of frequent
triumphs and some failures, of lessons hard at times, but kindly.
Passions and ennui, flashes of heroic patriotism, constant suffering and
stoical endurance, art and love idealised, fill up the life of Alfieri.
Goldoni clung much to his fellow-men, and shared their pains and
pleasures. Alfieri spent many of his years in almost absolute solitude.
On the whole character and deeds of the one man was stamped Comedy:
the other was own son of Tragedy.
If, after reading the autobiographies of Alfieri and Goldoni, we turn to
the perusal of their plays, we shall perceive that there is no better
commentary on the works of an artist than his life, and no better life
than one written by himself. The old style of criticism, which strove to
separate an author's productions from his life, and even from the age in
which he lived, to set up an arbitrary canon of taste, and to select one or
two great painters or poets as ideals because they seemed to illustrate
that canon, has passed away. We are beginning to feel that art is a part
of history and of physiology. That is to say, the artist's work can only
be rightly understood by studying his age and temperament. Goldoni's
versatility and want of depth induced him to write sparkling comedies.
The merry life men passed at Venice in its years of decadence proved
favourable to his genius. Alfieri's melancholy and passionate qualities,
fostered in solitude, and aggravated by a tyranny he could not bear, led
him irresistibly to tragic composition. Though a noble, his nobility only
added to his pride, and insensibly his intellect had been imbued with
the democratic sentiments which were destined to shake Europe in his
lifetime. This, in itself, was a tragic circumstance, bringing him into
close sympathy with the Brutus, the Prometheus, the Timoleon of
ancient history. Goldoni's bourgeoisie, in the atmosphere of which he
was born and bred, was essentially comic. The true comedy of manners,
which is quite distinct from Shakspere's fancy or from Aristophanic
satire, is always laid in middle life. Though Goldoni tried to write
tragedies, they were unimpassioned, dull, and tame. He lacked
altogether the fire, high-wrought nobility of sentiment, and sense of
form essential for tragic art. On the other hand, Alfieri composed some
comedies before his death which were devoid of humour, grace, and
lightness. A strange elephantine eccentricity is their utmost claim to
comic character. Indeed, the temper of Alfieri, ever in extremes, led
him even to exaggerate the qualities of tragedy. He carried its severity
to a pitch of dulness and monotony. His chiaroscuro was too strong;
virtue and villany appearing in pure black and white upon his pages.
His hatred of tyrants induced him to transgress the rules of probability,
so that it has been well said that if his wicked kings had really had such
words of scorn and hatred thrown at them by their victims, they were
greatly to be pitied. On the other hand, his pithy laconisms have often a
splendidly tragical effect. There is nothing in the modern drama more
rhetorically impressive, though spasmodic, than the well-known
dialogue between Antigone and Creon:-'Cr. Scegliesti?
'Ant. Ho scelto.
'Cr. Emon?
'Ant. Morte.
'Cr. L'avrai!'
Goldoni's comedies, again, have not enough of serious thought or of
true creative imagination to be works of high art. They lean too much
to the side of farce; they have none of the tragic salt which gives a
dignity to Tartuffe. They are, in a word, almost too enethistically
comic.
The contrast between these authors might lead us to raise the question
long ago discussed by Socrates at Agathon's banquet--Can the same
man write both comedies and tragedies? We in England are accustomed
to read the serious and comic plays of Shakspere, Fletcher, Jonson, and
to think that one poet could excel in either branch. The custom of the
Elizabethan theatre obliged this double authorship; yet it must be
confessed that Shakspere's comedies are not such comedies as Greek or
Romnan or French critics would admit. They are works of the purest
imagination, wholly free from the laws of this world; while the
tragedies of Fletcher have a melodramatic air equally at variance with
the classical Melpomene. It may very seriously be doubted whether the
same mind could produce, with equal power, a comedy like the
'Cortese Veneziano' and a tragedy like Alfieri's 'Brutus.' At any rate,
returning to our old position, we find in these two men the very
opposite conditions of dramatic genius. They are, as it were, specimens
prepared by Nature for the instruction of those who analyse genius in
its relations to temperament, to life, and to external circumstances.
*****
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: This Essay was written in 1866, and published in 1867.
Reprinting it in 1879, after eighteen months spent continuously in one
high valley of the Grisons, I feel how slight it is. For some amends, I
take this opportunity of printing at the end of it a description of Davos
in winter.]
[Footnote 2: See, however, what is said about Leo Battista Alberti in
the sketch of Rimini in the second series.]
[Footnote 3: The Grisons surname Campèll may derive from the
Romansch Campo Bello. The founder of the house was one Kaspar
Campèll, who in the first half of the sixteenth century preached the
Reformed religion in the Engadine.]
[Footnote 4: I have translated and printed at the end of the second
volume some sonnets of Petrarch as a kind of palinode for this
impertinence.]
[Footnote 5: This begs the question whether [Greek: leukoion] does not
properly mean snowflake, or some such flower. Violets in Greece,
however, were often used for crowns: [Greek: iostephanos] is the
epithet of Homer for Aphrodite, and of Aristophanes for Athens.]
[Footnote 6: Olive-trees must be studied at Mentone or San Remo, in
Corfu, at Tivoli, on the coast between Syracuse and Catania, or on the
lowlands of Apulia. The stunted but productive trees of the Rhone
valley, for example, are no real measure of the beauty they can exhibit.]
[Footnote 7: Dante, Par. xi. 106.]
[Footnote 8: It is but just to Doctor Pasta to remark that the above
sentence was written more than ten years ago. Since then he has
enlarged and improved his house in many ways, furnished it more
luxuriously, made paths through the beechwoods round it, and brought
excellent water at a great cost from a spring near the summit of the
mountain. A more charming residence from early spring to late autumn
can scarcely be discovered.]
[Footnote 9: 'The down upon their cheeks and chin was yellower than
helichrysus, and their breasts gleamed whiter far than thou, O Moon.']
[Footnote 10: 'Thy tresses have I oftentimes compared to Ceres' yellow
autumn sheaves, wreathed in curled bands around thy head.']
[Footnote 11: Both these and the large frescoes in the choir have been
chromolithographed by the Arundel Society.]
[Footnote 12: I cannot see clearly through these transactions, the
muddy waters of decadent Italian plot and counterplot being inscrutable
to senses assisted by nothing more luminous than mere tradition.]
[Footnote 13: Those who are interested in such matters may profitably
compare this description of a planned murder in the sixteenth century
with the account written by Ambrogio Tremazzi of the way in which he
tracked and slew Troilo Orsini in Paris in the year 1577. It is given by
Gnoli in his Vittoria Accoramboni, pp. 404-414.]
[Footnote 14: So far as I can discover, the only church of San Spirito in
Venice was a building on the island of San Spirito, erected by
Sansavino, which belonged to the Sestiere di S. Croce, and which was
suppressed in 1656. Its plate and the fine pictures which Titian painted
there were transferred at that date to S.M. della Salute. I cannot help
inferring that either Bibboni's memory failed him, or that his words
were wrongly understood by printer or amanuensis. If for S. Spirito we
substitute S. Stefano, the account would be intelligible.]
*****
SKETCHES AND STUDIES IN ITALY AND GREECE
BY JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
AUTHOR OF "RENAISSANCE IN ITALY" "STUDIES OF THE
GREEK POETS," ETC
SECOND SERIES
LONDON JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
1914
All rights reserved
FIRST EDITION (Smith, Elder & Co.) October, 1898 Reprinted May,
1900 Reprinted June, 1902 Reprinted November, 1905 Reprinted
December, 1907 Reprinted February, 1914 Taken over by John Murray
January, 1917
Printed in Great Britain at THE BALLANTYNE PRESS by
SPOTTISWOODE, BALLANTYNE & Co. LTD. Colchester, London
& Eton
CONTENTS
PAGE
RAVENNA 1 RIMINI 14 MAY IN UMBRIA 32 THE PALACE OF
URBINO 50 VITTORIA ACCORAMBONI 88 AUTUMN
WANDERINGS 127 PARMA 147 CANOSSA 163 FORNOVO 180
FLORENCE AND THE MEDICI 201 THE DEBT OF ENGLISH TO
ITALIAN LITERATURE 258 POPULAR SONGS OF TUSCANY
276 POPULAR ITALIAN POETRY OF THE RENAISSANCE 305
THE 'ORFEO' OF POLIZIANO 345 EIGHT SONNETS OF
PETRARCH 365
SKETCHES AND STUDIES IN ITALY AND GREECE
RAVENNA
The Emperor Augustus chose Ravenna for one of his two naval stations,
and in course of time a new city arose by the sea-shore, which received
the name of Portus Classis. Between this harbour and the mother city a
third town sprang up, and was called Cæsarea. Time and neglect, the
ravages of war, and the encroaching powers of Nature have destroyed
these settlements, and nothing now remains of the three cities but
Ravenna. It would seem that in classical times Ravenna stood, like
modern Venice, in the centre of a huge lagune, the fresh waters of the
Ronco and the Po mixing with the salt waves of the Adriatic round its
very walls. The houses of the city were built on piles; canals instead of
streets formed the means of communication, and these were always
filled with water artificially conducted from the southern estuary of the
Po. Round Ravenna extended a vast morass, for the most part under
shallow water, but rising at intervals into low islands like the Lido or
Murano or Torcello which surround Venice. These islands were
celebrated for their fertility: the vines and fig-trees and pomegranates,
springing from a fat and fruitful soil, watered with constant moisture,
and fostered by a mild sea-wind and liberal sunshine, yielded crops that
for luxuriance and quality surpassed the harvests of any orchards on the
mainland. All the conditions of life in old Ravenna seem to have
resembled those of modern Venice; the people went about in gondolas,
and in the early morning barges laden with fresh fruit or meat and
vegetables flocked from all quarters to the city of the sea.[1] Water also
had to be procured from the neighbouring shore, for, as Martial says, a
well at Ravenna was more valuable than a vineyard. Again, between
the city and the mainland ran a long low causeway all across the lagune
like that on which the trains now glide into Venice. Strange to say, the
air of Ravenna was remarkably salubrious: this fact, and the ease of life
that prevailed there, and the security afforded by the situation of the
town, rendered it a most desirable retreat for the monarchs of Italy
during those troublous times in which the empire nodded to its fall.
Honorius retired to its lagunes for safety; Odoacer, who dethroned the
last Cæsar of the West, succeeded him; and was in turn, supplanted by
Theodoric the Ostrogoth. Ravenna, as we see it now, recalls the
peaceful and half-Roman rule of the great Gothic king. His palace, his
churches, and the mausoleums in which his daughter Amalasuntha laid
the hero's bones, have survived the sieges of Belisarius and Astolphus,
the conquest of Pepin, the bloody quarrels of Iconoclasts with the
children of the Roman Church, the mediæval wars of Italy, the victory
of Gaston de Foix, and still stand gorgeous with marbles and mosaics
in spite of time and the decay of all around them.
As early as the sixth century, the sea had already retreated to such a
distance from Ravenna that orchards and gardens were cultivated on
the spot where once the galleys of the Cæsars rode at anchor. Groves of
pines sprang up along the shore, and in their lofty tops the music of the
wind moved like the ghost of waves and breakers plunging upon distant
sands. This Pinetum stretches along the shore of the Adriatic for about
forty miles, forming a belt of variable width between the great marsh
and the tumbling sea. From a distance the bare stems and velvet crowns
of the pine-trees stand up like palms that cover an oasis on Arabian
sands; but at a nearer view the trunks detach themselves from an
inferior forest-growth of juniper and thorn and ash and oak, the tall
roofs of the stately firs shooting their breadth of sheltering greenery
above the lower and less sturdy brushwood. It is hardly possible to
imagine a more beautiful and impressive scene than that presented by
these long alleys of imperial pines. They grow so thickly one behind
another, that we might compare them to the pipes of a great organ, or
the pillars of a Gothic church, or the basaltic columns of the Giant's
Causeway. Their tops are evergreen and laden with the heavy cones,
from which Ravenna draws considerable wealth. Scores of peasants are
quartered on the outskirts of the forest, whose business it is to scale the
pines and rob them of their fruit at certain seasons of the year.
Afterwards they dry the fir-cones in the sun, until the nuts which they
contain fall out. The empty husks are sold for firewood, and the kernels
in their stony shells reserved for exportation. You may see the peasants,
men, women, and boys, sorting them by millions, drying and sifting
them upon the open spaces of the wood, and packing them in sacks to
send abroad through Italy. The pinocchi or kernels of the stone-pine are
largely used in cookery, and those of Ravenna are prized for their good
quality and aromatic flavour. When roasted or pounded, they taste like
a softer and more mealy kind of almonds. The task of gathering this
harvest is not a little dangerous. Men have to cut notches in the straight
shafts, and having climbed, often to the height of eighty feet, to lean
upon the branches, and detach the fir-cones with a pole--and this for
every tree. Some lives, they say, are yearly lost in the business.
As may be imagined, the spaces of this great forest form the haunt of
innumerable living creatures. Lizards run about by myriads in the grass.
Doves coo among the branches of the pines, and nightingales pour their
full-throated music all day and night from thickets of white-thorn and
acacia. The air is sweet with aromatic scents: the resin of the pine and
juniper, the mayflowers and acacia-blossoms, the violets that spring by
thousands in the moss, the wild roses and faint honeysuckles which
throw fragrant arms from bough to bough of ash or maple, join to make
one most delicious perfume. And though the air upon the neighbouring
marsh is poisonous, here it is dry, and spreads a genial health. The
sea-wind murmuring through these thickets at nightfall or misty sunrise,
conveys no fever to the peasants stretched among their flowers. They
watch the red rays of sunset flaming through the columns of the leafy
hall, and flaring on its fretted rafters of entangled boughs; they see the
stars come out, and Hesper gleam, an eye of brightness, among dewy
branches; the moon walks silver-footed on the velvet tree-tops, while
they sleep beside the camp-fires; fresh morning wakes them to the
sound of birds and scent of thyme and twinkling of dewdrops on the
grass around. Meanwhile ague, fever, and death have been stalking all
night long about the plain, within a few yards of their couch, and not
one pestilential breath has reached the charmed precincts of the forest.
You may ride or drive for miles along green aisles between the pines in
perfect solitude; and yet the creatures of the wood, the sunlight and the
birds, the flowers and tall majestic columns at your side, prevent all
sense of loneliness or fear. Huge oxen haunt the wilderness--grey
creatures, with mild eyes and spreading horns and stealthy tread. Some
are patriarchs of the forest, the fathers and the mothers of many
generations who have been carried from their sides to serve in ploughs
or waggons on the Lombard plain. Others are yearling calves,
intractable and ignorant of labour. In order to subdue them to the yoke,
it is requisite to take them very early from their native glades, or else
they chafe and pine away with weariness. Then there is a sullen canal,
which flows through the forest from the marshes to the sea; it is alive
with frogs and newts and snakes. You may see these serpents basking
on the surface among thickets of the flowering rush, or coiled about the
lily leaves and flowers--lithe monsters, slippery and speckled, the
tyrants of the fen.
It is said that when Dante was living at Ravenna he would spend whole
days alone among the forest glades, thinking of Florence and her civil
wars, and meditating cantos of his poem. Nor have the influences of the
pine-wood failed to leave their trace upon his verse. The charm of its
summer solitude seems to have sunk into his soul; for when he
describes the whispering of winds and singing birds among the boughs
of his terrestrial paradise, he says:-Non però dal lor esser dritto sparte Tanto, che gli augelletti per le cime
Lasciasser d' operare ogni lor arte: Ma con piena letizia l' aure prime,
Cantando, ricevano intra le foglie, Che tenevan bordone alle sue rime
Tal, qual di ramo in ramo si raccoglie Per la pineta in sul lito di Chiassi
Quand' Eolo Scirocco fuor discioglie.
With these verses in our minds, while wandering down the grassy aisles,
beside the waters of the solitary place, we seem to meet that lady
singing as she went, and plucking flower by flower, 'like Proserpine
when Ceres lost a daughter, and she lost her spring.' There, too, the
vision of the griffin and the car, of singing maidens, and of Beatrice
descending to the sound of Benedictus and of falling flowers, her
flaming robe and mantle green as grass, and veil of white, and olive
crown, all flashed upon the poet's inner eye, and he remembered how
he bowed before her when a boy. There is yet another passage in which
it is difficult to believe that Dante had not the pine-forest in his mind.
When Virgil and the poet were waiting in anxiety before the gates of
Dis, when the Furies on the wall were tearing their breasts and crying,
'Venga Medusa, e si 'l farem di smalto,' suddenly across the hideous
river came a sound like that which whirlwinds make among the
shattered branches and bruised stems of forest-trees; and Dante,
looking out with fear upon the foam and spray and vapour of the flood,
saw thousands of the damned flying before the face of one who forded
Styx with feet unwet. 'Like frogs,' he says, 'they fled, who scurry
through the water at the sight of their foe, the serpent, till each squats
and hides himself close to the ground.' The picture of the storm among
the trees might well have occurred to Dante's mind beneath the roof of
pine-boughs. Nor is there any place in which the simile of the frogs and
water-snake attains such dignity and grandeur. I must confess that till I
saw the ponds and marshes of Ravenna, I used to fancy that the
comparison was somewhat below the greatness of the subject; but there
so grave a note of solemnity and desolation is struck, the scale of
Nature is so large, and the serpents coiling in and out among the lily
leaves and flowers are so much in their right place, that they suggest a
scene by no means unworthy of Dante's conception.
Nor is Dante the only singer who has invested this wood with poetical
associations. It is well known that Boccaccio laid his story of 'Honoria'
in the pine-forest, and every student of English literature must be
familiar with the noble tale in verse which Dryden has founded on this
part of the 'Decameron.' We all of us have followed Theodore, and
watched with him the tempest swelling in the grove, and seen the
hapless ghost pursued by demon hounds and hunter down the glades.
This story should be read while storms are gathering upon the distant
sea, or thunderclouds descending from the Apennines, and when the
pines begin to rock and surge beneath the stress of labouring winds.
Then runs the sudden flash of lightning like a rapier through the boughs,
the rain streams hissing down, and the thunder 'breaks like a whole sea
overhead.'
With the Pinetum the name of Byron will be for ever associated.
During his two years' residence in Ravenna he used to haunt its
wilderness, riding alone or in the company of friends. The inscription
placed above the entrance to the house he occupied alludes to it as one
of the objects which principally attracted the poet to the neighbourhood
of Ravenna: 'Impaziente di visitare l' antica selva, che inspirò già il
Divino e Giovanni Boccaccio.' We know, however, that a more
powerful attraction, in the person of the Countess Guiccioli, maintained
his fidelity to 'that place of old renown, once in the Adrian Sea,
Ravenna.'
Between the Bosco, as the people of Ravenna call this pine-wood, and
the city, the marsh stretches for a distance of about three miles. It is a
plain intersected by dykes and ditches, and mapped out into
innumerable rice-fields. For more than half a year it lies under water,
and during the other months exhales a pestilential vapour, which
renders it as uninhabitable as the Roman Campagna; yet in springtime
this dreary flat is even beautiful. The young blades of the rice shoot up
above the water, delicately green and tender. The ditches are lined with
flowering rush and golden flags, while white and yellow lilies sleep in
myriads upon the silent pools. Tamarisks wave their pink and silver
tresses by the road, and wherever a plot of mossy earth emerges from
the marsh, it gleams with purple orchises and flaming marigolds; but
the soil beneath is so treacherous and spongy, that these splendid
blossoms grow like flowers in dreams or fairy stories. You try in vain
to pick them; they elude your grasp, and flourish in security beyond the
reach of arm or stick.
Such is the sight of the old town of Classis. Not a vestige of the Roman
city remains, not a dwelling or a ruined tower, nothing but the ancient
church of S. Apollinare in Classe. Of all desolate buildings this is the
most desolate. Not even the deserted grandeur of S. Paolo beyond the
walls of Rome can equal it. Its bare round campanile gazes at the sky,
which here vaults only sea and plain--a perfect dome, star-spangled like
the roof of Galla Placidia's tomb. Ravenna lies low to west, the
pine-wood stretches away in long monotony to east. There is nothing
else to be seen except the spreading marsh, bounded by dim snowy
Alps and purple Apennines, so very far away that the level rack of
summer clouds seem more attainable and real. What sunsets and
sunrises that tower must see; what glaring lurid afterglows in August,
when the red light scowls upon the pestilential fen; what sheets of
sullen vapour rolling over it in autumn; what breathless heats, and
rainclouds big with thunder; what silences; what unimpeded blasts of
winter winds! One old monk tends this deserted spot. He has the huge
church, with its echoing aisles and marble columns and giddy
bell-tower and cloistered corridors, all to himself. At rare intervals,
priests from Ravenna come to sing some special mass at these cold
altars; pious folk make vows to pray upon their mouldy steps and kiss
the relics which are shown on great occasions. But no one stays; they
hurry, after muttering their prayers, from the fever-stricken spot,
reserving their domestic pieties and customary devotions for the
brighter and newer chapels of the fashionable churches in Ravenna. So
the old monk is left alone to sweep the marsh water from his church
floor, and to keep the green moss from growing too thickly on its
monuments. A clammy conferva covers everything except the mosaics
upon tribune, roof, and clerestory, which defy the course of age. Christ
on His throne sedet aternumque sedebit: the saints around him glitter
with their pitiless uncompromising eyes and wooden gestures, as if
twelve centuries had not passed over them, and they were nightmares
only dreamed last night, and rooted in a sick man's memory. For those
gaunt and solemn forms there is no change of life or end of days. No
fever touches them; no dampness of the wind and rain loosens their
firm cement. They stare with senseless faces in bitter mockery of men
who live and die and moulder away beneath. Their poor old guardian
told us it was a weary life. He has had the fever three times, and does
not hope to survive many more Septembers. The very water that he
drinks is brought him from Ravenna; for the vast fen, though it pours
its overflow upon the church floor, and spreads like a lake around, is
death to drink. The monk had a gentle woman's voice and mild brown
eyes. What terrible crime had consigned him to this living tomb? For
what past sorrow is he weary of his life? What anguish of remorse has
driven him to such a solitude? Yet he looked simple and placid; his
melancholy was subdued and calm, as if life were over for him, and he
were waiting for death to come with a friend's greeting upon noiseless
wings some summer night across the fen-lands in a cloud of soft
destructive fever-mist.
Another monument upon the plain is worthy of a visit. It is the
so-called Colonna dei Francesi, a cinquecento pillar of Ionic design,
erected on the spot where Gaston de Foix expired victorious after one
of the bloodiest battles ever fought. The Ronco, a straight sluggish
stream, flows by the lonely spot; mason bees have covered with
laborious stucco-work the scrolls and leafage of its ornaments,
confounding epitaphs and trophies under their mud houses. A few
cypress-trees stand round it, and the dogs and chickens of a
neighbouring farmyard make it their rendezvous. Those mason bees are
like posterity, which settles down upon the ruins of a Baalbec or a
Luxor, setting up its tents, and filling the fair spaces of Hellenic or
Egyptian temples with clay hovels. Nothing differs but the scale; and
while the bees content themselves with filling up and covering, man
destroys the silent places of the past which he appropriates.
In Ravenna itself, perhaps what strikes us most is the abrupt transition
everywhere discernible from monuments of vast antiquity to buildings
of quite modern date. There seems to be no interval between the
marbles and mosaics of Justinian or Theodoric and the insignificant
frippery of the last century. The churches of Ravenna--S. Vitale, S.
Apollinare, and the rest--are too well known, and have been too often
described by enthusiastic antiquaries, to need a detailed notice in this
place. Every one is aware that the ecclesiastical customs and
architecture of the early Church can be studied in greater perfection
here than elsewhere. Not even the basilicas and mosaics of Rome, nor
those of Palermo and Monreale, are equal for historical interest to those
of Ravenna. Yet there is not one single church which remains entirely
unaltered and unspoiled. The imagination has to supply the atrium or
outer portico from one building, the vaulted baptistery with its marble
font from another, the pulpits and ambones from a third the tribune
from a fourth, the round brick bell-tower from a fifth, and then to cover
all the concave roofs and chapel walls with grave and glittering
mosaics.
There is nothing more beautiful in decorative art than the mosaics of
such tiny buildings as the tomb of Galla Placidia or the chapel of the
Bishop's Palace. They are like jewelled and enamelled cases; not an
inch of wall can be seen which is not covered with elaborate patterns of
the brightest colours. Tall date-palms spring from the floor with fruit
and birds among their branches, and between them stand the pillars and
apostles of the Church. In the spandrels and lunettes above the arches
and the windows angels fly with white extended wings. On every
vacant place are scrolls and arabesques of foliage,--birds and beasts,
doves drinking from the vase, and peacocks spreading gorgeous
plumes--a maze of green and gold and blue. Overhead, the vault is
powdered with stars gleaming upon the deepest azure, and in the midst
is set an aureole embracing the majestic head of Christ, or else the
symbol of the sacred fish, or the hand of the Creator pointing from a
cloud. In Galla Placidia's tomb these storied vaults spring above the
sarcophagi of empresses and emperors, each lying in the place where
he was laid more than twelve centuries ago. The light which struggles
through the narrow windows serves to harmonise the brilliant hues and
make a gorgeous gloom.
Besides these more general and decorative subjects, many of the
churches are adorned with historical mosaics, setting forth the Bible
narrative or incidents from the life of Christian emperors and kings. In
S. Apollinare Nuovo there is a most interesting treble series of such
mosaics extending over both walls of the nave. On the left hand, as we
enter, we see the town of Classis; on the right the palace of Theodoric,
its doors and loggie rich with curtains, and its friezes blazing with
coloured ornaments. From the city gate of Classis virgins issue, and
proceed in a long line until they reach Madonna seated on a throne,
with Christ upon her knees, and the three kings in adoration at her feet.
From Theodoric's palace door a similar procession of saints and
martyrs carry us to Christ surrounded by archangels. Above this double
row of saints and virgins stand the fathers and prophets of the Church,
and highest underneath the roof are pictures from the life of our Lord. It
will be remembered in connection with these subjects that the women
sat upon the left and the men upon the right side of the church. Above
the tribune, at the east end of the church, it was customary to represent
the Creative Hand, or the monogram of the Saviour, or the head of
Christ with the letters A and [Greek Ô]. Moses and Elijah frequently
stand on either side to symbolise the transfiguration, while the saints
and bishops specially connected with the church appeared upon a lower
row. Then on the side walls were depicted such subjects as Justinian
and Theodora among their courtiers, or the grant of the privileges of the
church to its first founder from imperial patrons, with symbols of the
old Hebraic ritual--Abel's lamb, the sacrifice of Isaac, Melchisedec's
offering of bread and wine,--which were regarded as the types of
Christian ceremonies. The baptistery was adorned with appropriate
mosaics representing Christ's baptism in Jordan.
Generally speaking, one is struck with the dignity of these designs, and
especially with the combined majesty and sweetness of the face of
Christ. The sense for harmony of hue displayed in their composition is
marvellous. It would be curious to trace in detail the remnants of
classical treatment which may be discerned--Jordan, for instance, pours
his water from an urn like a river-god crowned with sedge--or to show
what points of ecclesiastical tradition are established these ancient
monuments. We find Mariolatry already imminent, the names of the
three kings, Kaspar, Melchior, and Balthazar, the four evangelists as we
now recognise them, and many of the rites and vestments which
Ritualists of all denominations regard with superstitious reverence.
There are two sepulchral monuments in Ravenna which cannot be
passed over unnoticed. The one is that of Theodoric the Goth, crowned
by its semisphere of solid stone, a mighty tomb, well worthy of the
conqueror and king. It stands in a green field, surrounded by acacias,
where the nightingales sing ceaselessly in May. The mason bees have
covered it, and the water has invaded its sepulchral vaults. In spite of
many trials, it seems that human art is unable to pump out the pond and
clear the frogs and efts from the chamber where the great Goth was laid
by Amalasuntha.
The other is Dante's temple, with its basrelief and withered garlands.
The story of his burial, and of the discovery of his real tomb, is fresh in
the memory of every one. But the 'little cupola, more neat than solemn,'
of which Lord Byron speaks, will continue to be the goal of many a
pilgrimage. For myself--though I remember Chateaubriand's
bareheaded genuflection on its threshold, Alfieri's passionate
prostration at the altar-tomb, and Byron's offering of poems on the
poet's shrine--I confess that a single canto of the 'Inferno,' a single
passage of the 'Vita Nuova,' seems more full of soul-stirring
associations than the place where, centuries ago, the mighty dust was
laid. It is the spirit that lives and makes alive. And Dante's spirit seems
more present with us under the pine-branches of the Bosco than beside
his real or fancied tomb. 'He is risen,'--'Lo, I am with you alway'--these
are the words that ought to haunt us in a burying-ground. There is
something affected and self-conscious in overpowering grief or
enthusiasm or humiliation at a tomb.
*****
RIMINI
SIGISMONDO PANDOLFO MALATESTA AND LEO BATTISTA
ALBERTI
Rimini is a city of about 18,000 souls, famous for its Stabilmento de'
Bagni and its antiquities, seated upon the coast of the Adriatic, a little
to the south-east of the world-historical Rubicon. It is our duty to
mention the baths first among its claims to distinction, since the
prosperity and cheerfulness of the little town depend on them in a great
measure. But visitors from the north will fly from these, to marvel at
the bridge which Augustus built and Tiberius completed, and which
still spans the Marecchia with five gigantic arches of white Istrian
limestone, as solidly as if it had not borne the tramplings of at least
three conquests. The triumphal arch, too, erected in honour of Augustus,
is a notable monument of Roman architecture. Broad, ponderous,
substantial, tufted here and there with flowering weeds, and
surmounted with mediaeval machicolations, proving it to have
sometimes stood for city gate or fortress, it contrasts most favourably
with the slight and somewhat gimcrack arch of Trajan in the sister city
of Ancona. Yet these remains of the imperial pontifices, mighty and
interesting as they are, sink into comparative insignificance beside the
one great wonder of Rimini, the cathedral remodelled for Sigismondo
Pandolfo Malatesta by Leo Battista Alberti in 1450. This strange
church, one of the earliest extant buildings in which the Neopaganism
of the Renaissance showed itself in full force, brings together before
our memory two men who might be chosen as typical in their
contrasted characters of the transitional age which gave them birth.
No one with any tincture of literary knowledge is ignorant of the fame
at least of the great Malatesta family--the house of the Wrongheads, as
they were rightly called by some prevision of their future part in
Lombard history. The readers of the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth
cantos of the 'Inferno' have all heard of
E il mastin vecchio e il nuovo da Verucchio Che fecer di Montagna il
mal governo,
while the story of Francesca da Polenta, who was wedded to the
hunchback Giovanni Malatesta and murdered by him with her lover
Paolo, is known not merely to students of Dante, but to readers of
Byron and Leigh Hunt, to admirers of Flaxman, Ary Scheffer, Doré--to
all, in fact, who have of art and letters any love.
The history of these Malatesti, from their first establishment under
Otho III. as lieutenants for the Empire in the Marches of Ancona, down
to their final subjugation by the Papacy in the age of the Renaissance, is
made up of all the vicissitudes which could befall a mediaeval Italian
despotism. Acquiring an unlawful right over the towns of Rimini,
Cesena, Sogliano, Ghiacciuolo, they ruled their petty principalities like
tyrants by the help of the Guelf and Ghibelline factions, inclining to the
one or the other as it suited their humour or their interest, wrangling
among themselves, transmitting the succession of their dynasty through
bastards and by deeds of force, quarrelling with their neighbours the
Counts of Urbino, alternately defying and submitting to the Papal
legates in Romagna, serving as condottieri in the wars of the Visconti
and the state of Venice, and by their restlessness and genius for military
intrigues contributing in no slight measure to the general disturbance of
Italy. The Malatesti were a race of strongly marked character: more,
perhaps, than any other house of Italian tyrants, they combined for
generations those qualities of the fox and the lion, which Machiavelli
thought indispensable to a successful despot. Son after son, brother
with brother, they continued to be fierce and valiant soldiers, cruel in
peace, hardy in war, but treasonable and suspicious in all transactions
that could not be settled by the sword. Want of union, with them as
with the Baglioni and many other of the minor noble families in Italy,
prevented their founding a substantial dynasty. Their power, based on
force, was maintained by craft and crime, and transmitted through
tortuous channels by intrigue. While false in their dealings with the
world at large, they were diabolical in the perfidy with which they
treated one another. No feudal custom, no standard of hereditary right,
ruled the succession in their family. Therefore the ablest Malatesta for
the moment clutched what he could of the domains that owned his
house for masters. Partitions among sons or brothers, mutually hostile
and suspicious, weakened the whole stock. Yet they were great enough
to hold their own for centuries among the many tyrants who infested
Lombardy. That the other princely families of Romagna, Emilia, and
the March were in the same state of internal discord and
dismemberment, was probably one reason why the Malatesti stood their
ground so firmly as they did.
So far as Rimini is concerned, the house of Malatesta culminated in
Sigismondo Pandolfo, son of Gian Galeazzo Visconti's general, the
perfidious Pandolfo. It was he who built the Rocca, or castle of the
despots, which stands a little way outside the town, commanding a fair
view of Apennine tossed hill-tops and broad Lombard plain, and who
remodelled the Cathedral of S. Francis on a plan suggested by the
greatest genius of the age. Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta was one of
the strangest products of the earlier Renaissance. To enumerate the
crimes which he committed within the sphere of his own family,
mysterious and inhuman outrages which render the tale of the Cenci
credible, would violate the decencies of literature. A thoroughly bestial
nature gains thus much with posterity that its worst qualities must be
passed by in silence. It is enough to mention that he murdered three
wives in succession,[2] Bussoni di Carmagnuola, Guinipera d'Este, and
Polissena Sforza, on various pretexts of infidelity, and carved horns
upon his own tomb with this fantastic legend underneath:-Porto le corna ch' ognuno le vede, E tal le porta che non se lo crede.
He died in wedlock with the beautiful and learned Isotta degli Atti, who
had for some time been his mistress. But, like most of the Malatesti, he
left no legitimate offspring. Throughout his life he was distinguished
for bravery and cunning, for endurance of fatigue and rapidity of action,
for an almost fretful rashness in the execution of his schemes, and for a
character terrible in its violence. He was acknowledged as a great
general; yet nothing succeeded with him. The long warfare which he
carried on against the Duke of Montefeltro ended in his discomfiture.
Having begun by defying the Holy See, he was impeached at Rome for
heresy, parricide, incest, adultery, rape, and sacrilege, burned in effigy
by Pope Pius II., and finally restored to the bosom of the Church, after
suffering the despoliation of almost all his territories, in 1463. The
occasion on which this fierce and turbulent despiser of laws human and
divine was forced to kneel as a penitent before the Papal legate in the
gorgeous temple dedicated to his own pride, in order that the ban of
excommunication might be removed from Rimini, was one of those
petty triumphs, interesting chiefly for their picturesqueness, by which
the Popes confirmed their questionable rights over the cities of
Romagna. Sigismondo, shorn of his sovereignty, took the command of
the Venetian troops against the Turks in the Morea, and returned in
1465, crowned with laurels, to die at Rimini in the scene of his old
splendour.
A very characteristic incident belongs to this last act of his life.
Dissolute, treacherous, and inhuman as he was, the tyrant of Rimini had
always encouraged literature, and delighted in the society of artists. He
who could brook no contradiction from a prince or soldier, allowed the
pedantic scholars of the sixteenth century to dictate to him in matters of
taste, and sat with exemplary humility at the feet of Latinists like
Porcellio, Basinio, and Trebanio. Valturio, the engineer, and Alberti,
the architect, were his familiar friends; and the best hours of his life
were spent in conversation with these men. Now that he found himself
upon the sacred soil of Greece, he was determined not to return to Italy
empty-handed. Should he bring manuscripts or marbles, precious vases
or inscriptions in half-legible Greek character? These relics were
greedily sought for by the potentates of Italian cities; and no doubt
Sigismondo enriched his library with some such treasures. But he
obtained a nobler prize--nothing less than the body of a saint of
scholarship, the authentic bones of the great Platonist, Gemisthus
Pletho.[3] These he exhumed from their Greek grave and caused them
to be deposited in a stone sarcophagus outside the cathedral of his
building in Rimini. The Venetians, when they stole the body of S. Mark
from Alexandria, were scarcely more pleased than was Sigismondo
with the acquisition of this Father of the Neopagan faith. Upon the
tomb we still may read this legend: 'Jemisthii Bizantii philosopher sua
temp principis reliquum Sig. Pan. Mal. Pan. F. belli Pelop adversus
Turcor regem Imp ob ingentem eruditorum quo flagrat amorem huc
afferendum introque mittendum curavit MCCCCLXVI.' Of the Latinity
of the inscription much cannot be said; but it means that 'Sigismondo
Pandolfo Malatesta, having served as general against the Turks in the
Morea, induced by the great love with which he burns for all learned
men, brought and placed here the remains of Gemisthus of Byzantium,
the prince of the philosophers of his day.'
Sigismondo's portrait, engraved on medals, and sculptured upon every
frieze and point of vantage in the Cathedral of Rimini, well denotes the
man. His face is seen in profile. The head, which is low and flat above
the forehead, rising swiftly backward from the crown, carries a thick
bushy shock of hair curling at the ends, such as the Italians call a
zazzera. The eye is deeply sunk, with long venomous flat eyelids, like
those which Leonardo gives to his most wicked faces. The nose is long
and crooked, curved like a vulture's over a petulant mouth, with lips
deliberately pressed together, as though it were necessary to control
some nervous twitching. The cheek is broad, and its bone is strongly
marked. Looking at these features in repose, we cannot but picture to
our fancy what expression they might assume under a sudden fit of fury,
when the sinews of the face were contracted with quivering spasms,
and the lips writhed in sympathy with knit forehead and wrinkled
eyelids.
Allusion has been made to the Cathedral of S. Francis at Rimini, as the
great ornament of the town, and the chief monument of Sigismondo's
fame. It is here that all the Malatesti lie. Here too is the chapel
consecrated to Isotta, 'Divæ Isottæ Sacrum;' and the tombs of the
Malatesta ladies, 'Malatestorum domûs heroidum sepulchrum;' and
Sigismondo's own grave with the cuckold's horns and scornful epitaph.
Nothing but the fact that the church is duly dedicated to S. Francis, and
that its outer shell of classic marble encases an old Gothic edifice,
remains to remind us that it is a Christian place of worship.[4] It has no
sanctity, no spirit of piety. The pride of the tyrant whose
legend--'Sigismundus Pandulphus Malatesta Pan. F. Fecit Anno Gratiæ
MCCCCL'--occupies every arch and stringcourse of the architecture,
and whose coat-of-arms and portrait in medallion, with his cipher and
his emblems of an elephant and a rose, are wrought in every piece of
sculptured work throughout the building, seems so to fill this house of
prayer that there is no room left for God. Yet the Cathedral of Rimini
remains a monument of first-rate importance for all students who seek
to penetrate the revived Paganism of the fifteenth century. It serves also
to bring a far more interesting Italian of that period than the tyrant of
Rimini himself, before our notice.
In the execution of his design, Sigismondo received the assistance of
one of the most remarkable men of this or any other age. Leo Battista
Alberti, a scion of the noble Florentine house of that name, born during
the exile of his parents, and educated in the Venetian territory, was
endowed by nature with aptitudes, faculties, and sensibilities so varied,
as to deserve the name of universal genius. Italy in the Renaissance
period was rich in natures of this sort, to whom nothing that is strange
or beautiful seemed unfamiliar, and who, gifted with a kind of
divination, penetrated the secrets of the world by sympathy. To Pico
della Mirandola, Lionardo da Vinci, and Michel Agnolo Buonarroti
may be added Leo Battista Alberti. That he achieved less than his great
compeers, and that he now exists as the shadow of a mighty name, was
the effect of circumstances. He came half a century too early into the
world, and worked as a pioneer rather than a settler of the realm which
Lionardo ruled as his demesne. Very early in his boyhood Alberti
showed the versatility of his talents. The use of arms, the management
of horses, music, painting, modelling for sculpture, mathematics,
classical and modern literature, physical science as then comprehended,
and all the bodily exercises proper to the estate of a young nobleman,
were at his command. His biographer asserts that he was never idle,
never subject to ennui or fatigue. He used to say that books at times
gave him the same pleasure as brilliant jewels or perfumed flowers:
hunger and sleep could not keep him from them then. At other times
the letters on the page appeared to him like twining and contorted
scorpions, so that he preferred to gaze on anything but written scrolls.
He would then turn to music or painting, or to the physical sports in
which he excelled. The language in which this alternation of passion
and disgust for study is expressed, bears on it the stamp of Alberti's
peculiar temperament, his fervid and imaginative genius, instinct with
subtle sympathies and strange repugnances. Flying from his study, he
would then betake himself to the open air. No one surpassed him in
running, in wrestling, in the force with which he cast his javelin or
discharged his arrows. So sure was his aim and so skilful his cast, that
he could fling a farthing from the pavement of the square, and make it
ring against a church roof far above. When he chose to jump, he put his
feet together and bounded over the shoulders of men standing erect
upon the ground. On horseback he maintained perfect equilibrium, and
seemed incapable of fatigue. The most restive and vicious animals
trembled under him and became like lambs. There was a kind of
magnetism in the man. We read, besides these feats of strength and
skill, that he took pleasure in climbing mountains, for no other purpose
apparently than for the joy of being close to nature.
In this, as in many other of his instincts, Alberti was before his age. To
care for the beauties of landscape unadorned by art, and to sympathise
with sublime or rugged scenery, was not in the spirit of the Renaissance.
Humanity occupied the attention of poets and painters; and the age was
yet far distant when the pantheistic feeling for the world should
produce the art of Wordsworth and of Turner. Yet a few great natures
even then began to comprehend the charm and mystery which the
Greeks had imaged in their Pan, the sense of an all-pervasive spirit in
wild places, the feeling of a hidden want, the invisible tie which makes
man a part of rocks and woods and streams around him. Petrarch had
already ascended the summit of Mont Ventoux, to meditate, with an
exaltation of the soul he scarcely understood, upon the scene spread at
his feet and above his head. Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini delighted in
wild places for no mere pleasure of the chase, but for the joy he took in
communing with nature. How S. Francis found God in the sun and the
air, the water and the stars, we know by his celebrated hymn; and of
Dante's acute observation, every canto of the 'Divine Comedy' is
witness.
Leo Alberti was touched in spirit by even a deeper and a stranger
pathos than any of these men: 'In the early spring, when he beheld the
meadows and hills covered with flowers, and saw the trees and plants
of all kinds bearing promise of fruit, his heart became exceeding
sorrowful; and when in autumn he looked on fields heavy with harvest
and orchards apple-laden, he felt such grief that many even saw him
weep for the sadness of his soul.' It would seem that he scarcely
understood the source of this sweet trouble: for at such times he
compared the sloth and inutility of men with the industry and fertility
of nature; as though this were the secret of his melancholy. A poet of
our century has noted the same stirring of the spirit, and has striven to
account for it:-Tears from the depth of some divine despair Rise in the heart, and
gather to the eyes, In looking on the happy autumn fields, And thinking
of the days that are no more.
Both Alberti and Tennyson have connected the mal du pays of the
human soul for that ancient country of its birth, the mild Saturnian
earth from which we sprang, with a sense of loss. It is the waste of
human energy that affects Alberti; the waste of human life touches the
modern poet. Yet both perhaps have scarcely interpreted their own
spirit; for is not the true source of tears deeper and more secret? Man is
a child of nature in the simplest sense; and the stirrings of the secular
breasts that gave him suck, and on which he even now must hang, have
potent influences over his emotions.
Of Alberti's extraordinary sensitiveness to all such impressions many
curious tales are told. The sight of refulgent jewels, of flowers, and of
fair landscapes, had the same effect upon his nerves as the sound of the
Dorian mood upon the youths whom Pythagoras cured of passion by
music. He found in them an anodyne for pain, a restoration from
sickness. Like Walt Whitman, who adheres to nature by closer and
more vital sympathy than any other poet of the modern world, Alberti
felt the charm of excellent old age no less than that of florid youth. 'On
old men gifted with a noble presence and hale and vigorous, he gazed
again and again, and said that he revered in them the delights of nature
(naturæ delitias).' Beasts and birds and all living creatures moved him
to admiration for the grace with which they had been gifted, each in his
own kind. It is even said that he composed a funeral oration for a dog
which he had loved and which died.
To this sensibility for all fair things in nature, Alberti added the charm
of a singularly sweet temper and graceful conversation. The activity of
his mind, which was always being exercised on subjects of grave
speculation, removed him from the noise and bustle of commonplace
society. He was somewhat silent, inclined to solitude, and of a pensive
countenance; yet no man found him difficult of access: his courtesy
was exquisite, and among familiar friends he was noted for the flashes
of a delicate and subtle wit. Collections were made of his apophthegms
by friends, and some are recorded by his anonymous biographer.[5]
Their finer perfume, as almost always happens with good sayings
which do not certain the full pith of a proverb, but owe their force, in
part at least, to the personality of their author, and to the happy moment
of their production, has evanesced. Here, however, is one which seems
still to bear the impress of Alberti's genius: 'Gold is the soul of labour,
and labour the slave of pleasure.' Of women he used to say that their
inconstancy was an antidote to their falseness; for if a woman could but
persevere in what she undertook, all the fair works of men would be
ruined. One of his strongest moral sentences is aimed at envy, from
which he suffered much in his own life, and against which he guarded
with a curious amount of caution. His own family grudged the
distinction which his talents gained for him, and a dark story is told of a
secret attempt made by them to assassinate him through his servants.
Alberti met these ignoble jealousies with a stately calm and a sweet
dignity of demeanour, never condescending to accuse his relatives,
never seeking to retaliate, but acting always for the honour of his
illustrious house. In the same spirit of generosity he refused to enter
into wordy warfare with detractors and calumniators, sparing the
reputation even of his worst enemy when chance had placed him in his
power. This moderation both of speech and conduct was especially
distinguished in an age which tolerated the fierce invectives of Filelfo,
and applauded the vindictive courage of Cellini. To money Alberti
showed a calm indifference. He committed his property to his friends
and shared with them in common. Nor was he less careless about
vulgar fame, spending far more pains in the invention of machinery and
the discovery of laws, than in their publication to the world. His service
was to knowledge, not to glory. Self-control was another of his eminent
qualities. With the natural impetuosity of a large heart, and the vivacity
of a trained athlete, he yet never allowed himself to be subdued by
anger or by sensual impulses, but took pains to preserve his character
unstained and dignified before the eyes of men. A story is told of him
which may remind us of Goethe's determination to overcome his
giddiness. In his youth his head was singularly sensitive to changes of
temperature; but by gradual habituation he brought himself at last to
endure the extremes of heat and cold bareheaded. In like manner he had
a constitutional disgust for onions and honey; so powerful, that the very
sight of these things made him sick. Yet by constantly viewing and
touching what was disagreeable, he conquered these dislikes; and
proved that men have a complete mastery over what is merely
instinctive in their nature. His courage corresponded to his splendid
physical development. When a boy of fifteen, he severely wounded
himself in the foot. The gash had to be probed and then sewn up.
Alberti not only bore the pain of this operation without a groan, but
helped the surgeon with his own hands; and effected a cure of the fever
which succeeded by the solace of singing to his cithern. For music he
had a genius of the rarest order; and in painting he is said to have
achieved success. Nothing, however, remains of his work and from
what Vasari says of it, we may fairly conclude that he gave less care to
the execution of finished pictures, than to drawings subsidiary to
architectural and mechanical designs. His biographer relates that when
he had completed a painting, he called children and asked them what it
meant. If they did not know, he reckoned it a failure. He was also in the
habit of painting from memory. While at Venice, he put on canvas the
faces of friends at Florence whom he had not seen for months. That the
art of painting was subservient in his estimation to mechanics, is
indicated by what we hear about the camera, in which he showed
landscapes by day and the revolutions of the stars by night, so lively
drawn that the spectators were affected with amazement. The
semi-scientific impulse to extend man's mastery over nature, the
magician's desire to penetrate secrets, which so powerfully influenced
the development of Lionardo's genius, seems to have overcome the
purely æsthetic instincts of Alberti, so that he became in the end neither
a great artist like Raphael, nor a great discoverer like Galileo, but rather
a clairvoyant to whom the miracles of nature and of art lie open.
After the first period of youth was over, Leo Battista Alberti devoted
his great faculties and all his wealth of genius to the study of the
law--then, as now, the quicksand of the noblest natures. The industry
with which he applied himself to the civil and ecclesiastical codes
broke his health. For recreation he composed a Latin comedy called
'Philodoxeos,' which imposed upon the judgment of scholars, and was
ascribed as a genuine antique to Lepidus, the comic poet. Feeling
stronger, Alberti returned at the age of twenty to his law studies, and
pursued them in the teeth of disadvantages. His health was still
uncertain, and the fortune of an exile reduced him to the utmost want. It
was no wonder that under these untoward circumstances even his
Herculean strength gave way. Emaciated and exhausted, he lost the
clearness of his eyesight, and became subject to arterial disturbances,
which filled his ears with painful sounds. This nervous illness is not
dissimilar to that which Rousseau describes in the confessions of his
youth. In vain, however, his physicians warned Alberti of impending
peril. A man of so much stanchness, accustomed to control his nature
with an iron will, is not ready to accept advice. Alberti persevered in
his studies, until at last the very seat of intellect was invaded. His
memory began to fail him for names, while he still retained with
wonderful accuracy whatever he had seen with his eyes. It was now
impossible to think of law as a profession. Yet since he could not live
without severe mental exercise, he had recourse to studies which tax
the verbal memory less than the intuitive faculties of the reason.
Physics and mathematics became his chief resource; and he devoted his
energies to literature. His 'Treatise on the Family' may be numbered
among the best of those compositions on social and speculative
subjects in which the Italians of the Renaissance sought to rival Cicero.
His essays on the arts are mentioned by Vasari with sincere approbation.
Comedies, interludes, orations, dialogues, and poems flowed with
abundance from his facile pen. Some were written in Latin, which he
commanded more than fairly; some in the Tuscan tongue, of which
owing to the long exile of his family in Lombardy, he is said to have
been less a master. It was owing to this youthful illness, from which
apparently his constitution never wholly recovered, that Alberti's
genius was directed to architecture.
Through his friendship with Flavio Biondo, the famous Roman
antiquary, Alberti received an introduction to Nicholas V. at the time
when this, the first great Pope of the Renaissance, was engaged in
rebuilding the palaces and fortifications of Rome. Nicholas discerned
the genius of the man, and employed him as his chief counsellor in all
matters of architecture. When the Pope died, he was able, while reciting
his long Latin will upon his deathbed, to boast that he had restored the
Holy See to its due dignity, and the Eternal City to the splendour
worthy of the seat of Christendom. The accomplishment of the second
part of his work he owed to the genius of Alberti. After doing thus
much for Rome under Thomas of Sarzana, and before beginning to
beautify Florence at the instance of the Rucellai family, Alberti entered
the service of the Malatesta, and undertook to remodel the Cathedral of
S. Francis at Rimini. He found it a plain Gothic structure with apse and
side chapels. Such churches are common enough in Italy, where
pointed architecture never developed its true character of complexity
and richness, but was doomed to the vast vacuity exemplified in S.
Petronio of Bologna. He left it a strange medley of mediæval and
Renaissance work, a symbol of that dissolving scene in the world's
pantomime, when the spirit of classic art, as yet but little
comprehended, was encroaching on the early Christian taste. Perhaps
the mixture of styles so startling in S. Francesco ought not to be laid to
the charge of Alberti, who had to execute the task of turning a Gothic
into a classic building. All that he could do was to alter the whole
exterior of the church, by affixing a screen-work of Roman arches and
Corinthian pilasters, so as to hide the old design and yet to leave the
main features of the fabric, the windows and doors especially, in statu
quo. With the interior he dealt upon the same general principle, by not
disturbing its structure, while he covered every available square inch of
surface with decorations alien to the Gothic manner. Externally, S.
Francesco is perhaps the most original and graceful of the many
attempts made by Italian builders to fuse the mediæval and the classic
styles. For Alberti attempted nothing less. A century elapsed before
Palladio, approaching the problem from a different point of view,
restored the antique in its purity, and erected in the Palazzo della
Ragione of Vicenza an almost unique specimen of resuscitated Roman
art.
Internally, the beauty of the church is wholly due to its exquisite
wall-ornaments. These consist for the most part of low reliefs in a soft
white stone, many of them thrown out upon a blue ground in the style
of Della Robbia. Allegorical figures designed with the purity of outline
we admire in Botticelli, draperies that Burne-Jones might copy, troops
of singing boys in the manner of Donatello, great angels traced upon
the stone so delicately that they seem to be rather drawn than
sculptured, statuettes in niches, personifications of all arts and sciences
alternating with half-bestial shapes of satyrs and sea-children:--such are
the forms which fill the spaces of the chapel walls, and climb the
pilasters, and fret the arches, in such abundance that had the whole
church been finished as it was designed, it would have presented one
splendid though bizarre effect of incrustation. Heavy screens of Verona
marble, emblazoned in open arabesques with the ciphers of Sigismondo
and Isotta, with coats-of-arms, emblems, and medallion portraits, shut
the chapels from the nave. Who produced all this sculpture it is difficult
to say. Some of it is very good: much is indifferent. We may hazard the
opinion that, besides Bernardo Ciuffagni, of whom Vasari speaks, some
pupils of Donatello and Benedetto da Majano worked at it. The
influence of the sculptors of Florence is everywhere perceptible.
Whatever be the merit of these reliefs, there is no doubt that they fairly
represent one of the most interesting moments in the history of modern
art. Gothic inspiration had failed; the early Tuscan style of the Pisani
had been worked out; Michelangelo was yet far distant, and the
abundance of classic models had not overwhelmed originality. The
sculptors of the school of Ghiberti and Donatello, who are represented
in this church, were essentially pictorial, preferring low to high relief,
and relief in general to detached figures. Their style, like the style of
Boiardo in poetry, of Botticelli in painting, is specific to Italy in the
middle of the fifteenth century. Mediæval standards of taste were
giving way to classical, Christian sentiment to Pagan; yet the imitation
of the antique had not been carried so far as to efface the spontaneity of
the artist, and enough remained of Christian feeling to tinge the fancy
with a grave and sweet romance. The sculptor had the skill and mastery
to express his slightest shade of thought with freedom, spirit, and
precision. Yet his work showed no sign of conventionality, no
adherence to prescribed rules. Every outline, every fold of drapery,
every attitude was pregnant, to the artist's own mind at any rate, with
meaning. In spite of its symbolism, what he wrought was never
mechanically figurative, but gifted with the independence of its own
beauty, vital with an inbreathed spirit of life. It was a happy moment,
when art had reached consciousness, and the artist had not yet become
self-conscious. The hand and the brain then really worked together for
the procreation of new forms of grace, not for the repetition of old
models, or for the invention of the strange and startling. 'Delicate,
sweet, and captivating,' are good adjectives to express the effect
produced upon the mind by the contemplation even of the average work
of this period.
To study the flowing lines of the great angels traced upon the walls of
the Chapel of S. Sigismund in the Cathedral of Rimini, to follow the
undulations of their drapery that seems to float, to feel the dignified
urbanity of all their gestures, is like listening to one of those clear early
Italian compositions for the voice, which surpasses in suavity of tone
and grace of movement all that Music in her full-grown vigour has
produced. There is indeed something infinitely charming in the
crepuscular moments of the human mind. Whether it be the rathe
loveliness of an art still immature, or the beauty of art upon the
wane--whether, in fact, the twilight be of morning or of evening, we
find in the masterpieces of such periods a placid calm and chastened
pathos, as of a spirit self-withdrawn from vulgar cares, which in the full
light of meridian splendour is lacking. In the Church of S. Francesco at
Rimini the tempered clearness of the dawn is just about to broaden into
day.
*****
MAY IN UMBRIA
FROM ROME TO TERNI
We left Rome in clear sunset light. The Alban Hills defined themselves
like a cameo of amethyst upon a pale blue distance; and over the Sabine
Mountains soared immeasurable moulded domes of alabaster
thunderclouds, casting deep shadows, purple and violet, across the
slopes of Tivoli. To westward the whole sky was lucid, like some
half-transparent topaz, flooded with slowly yellowing sunbeams. The
Campagna has often been called a garden of wild-flowers. Just now
poppy and aster, gladiolus and thistle, embroider it with patterns
infinite and intricate beyond the power of art. They have already mown
the hay in part; and the billowy tracts of greyish green, where no
flowers are now in bloom, supply a restful groundwork to those
brilliant patches of diapered fioriture. These are like praying-carpets
spread for devotees upon the pavement of a mosque whose roof is
heaven. In the level light the scythes of the mowers flash as we move
past. From their bronzed foreheads the men toss masses of dark curls.
Their muscular flanks and shoulders sway sideways from firm yet
pliant reins. On one hill, fronting the sunset, there stands a herd of
some thirty huge grey oxen, feeding and raising their heads to look at
us, with just a flush of crimson on their horns and dewlaps. This is the
scale of Mason's and of Costa's colouring. This is the breadth and
magnitude of Rome.
Thus, through dells of ilex and oak, yielding now a glimpse of Tiber
and S. Peter's, now opening on a purple section of the distant Sabine
Hills, we came to Monte Rotondo. The sun sank; and from the flames
where he had perished, Hesper and the thin moon, very white and keen,
grew slowly into sight. Now we follow the Tiber, a swollen, hurrying,
turbid river, in which the mellowing Western sky reflects itself. This
changeful mirror of swift waters spreads a dazzling foreground to
valley, hill, and lustrous heaven. There is orange on the far horizon, and
a green ocean above, in which sea-monsters fashioned from the clouds
are floating. Yonder swims an elf with luminous hair astride upon a
sea-horse, and followed by a dolphin plunging through the fiery waves.
The orange deepens into dying red. The green divides into daffodil and
beryl. The blue above grows fainter, and the moon and stars shine
stronger.
Through these celestial changes we glide into a landscape fit for
Francia and the early Umbrian painters. Low hills to right and left;
suavely modelled heights in the far distance; a very quiet width of plain,
with slender trees ascending into the pellucid air; and down in the
mystery of the middle distance a glimpse of heaven-reflecting water.
The magic of the moon and stars lends enchantment to this scene. No
painting could convey their influences. Sometimes both luminaries
tremble, all dispersed and broken, on the swirling river. Sometimes
they sleep above the calm cool reaches of a rush-grown mere. And here
and there a ruined turret, with a broken window and a tuft of shrubs
upon the rifted battlement, gives value to the fading pallor of the West.
The last phase in the sunset is a change to blue-grey monochrome,
faintly silvered with starlight; hills, Tiber, fields and woods, all floating
in aërial twilight. There is no definition of outline now. The daffodil of
the horizon has faded into scarcely perceptible pale greenish yellow.
We have passed Stimigliano. Through the mystery of darkness we
hurry past the bridges of Augustus and the lights of Narni.
THE CASCADES OF TERNI
The Velino is a river of considerable volume which rises in the highest
region of the Abruzzi, threads the upland valley of Rieti, and
precipitates itself by an artificial channel over cliffs about seven
hundred feet in height into the Nera. The water is densely charged with
particles of lime. This calcareous matter not only tends continually to
choke its bed, but clothes the precipices over which the torrent thunders
with fantastic drapery of stalactite; and, carried on the wind in foam,
incrusts the forests that surround the falls with fine white dust. These
famous cascades are undoubtedly the most sublime and beautiful which
Europe boasts; and their situation is worthy of so great a natural
wonder. We reach them through a noble mid-Italian landscape, where
the mountain forms are austere and boldly modelled, but the vegetation,
both wild and cultivated, has something of the South-Italian richness.
The hillsides are a labyrinth of box and arbutus, with coronilla in
golden bloom. The turf is starred with cyclamens and orchises.
Climbing the staircase paths beside the falls in morning sunlight, or
stationed on the points of vantage that command their successive
cataracts, we enjoyed a spectacle which might be compared in its effect
upon the mind to the impression left by a symphony or a tumultuous
lyric. The turbulence and splendour, the swiftness and resonance, the
veiling of the scene in smoke of shattered water-masses, the withdrawal
of these veils according as the volume of the river slightly shifted in its
fall, the rainbows shimmering on the silver spray, the shivering of
poplars hung above impendent precipices, the stationary grandeur of
the mountains keeping watch around, the hurry and the incoherence of
the cataracts, the immobility of force and changeful changelessness in
nature, were all for me the elements of one stupendous poem. It was
like an ode of Shelley translated into symbolism, more vivid through
inarticulate appeal to primitive emotion than any words could be.
MONTEFALCO
The rich land of the Clitumnus is divided into meadows by transparent
watercourses, gliding with a glassy current over swaying reeds.
Through this we pass, and leave Bevagna to the right, and ascend one
of those long gradual roads which climb the hills where all the cities of
the Umbrians perch. The view expands, revealing Spello, Assisi,
Perugia on its mountain buttress, and the far reaches northward of the
Tiber valley. Then Trevi and Spoleto came into sight, and the severe
hill-country above Gubbio in part disclosed itself. Over Spoleto the
fierce witch-haunted heights of Norcia rose forbidding. This is the kind
of panorama that dilates the soul. It is so large, so dignified, so
beautiful in tranquil form. The opulent abundance of the plain contrasts
with the severity of mountain ranges desolately grand; and the name of
each of all those cities thrills the heart with memories.
The main object of a visit to Montefalco is to inspect its many excellent
frescoes; painted histories of S. Francis and S. Jerome, by Benozzo
Gozzoli; saints, angels, and Scripture episodes by the gentle Tiberio
d'Assisi. Full justice had been done to these, when a little boy, seeing
us lingering outside the church of S. Chiara, asked whether we should
not like to view the body of the saint. This privilege could be purchased
at the price of a small fee. It was only necessary to call the guardian of
her shrine at the high altar. Indolent, and in compliant mood, with
languid curiosity and half an hour to spare, we assented. A handsome
young man appeared, who conducted us with decent gravity into a little
darkened chamber behind the altar. There he lighted wax tapers,
opened sliding doors in what looked like a long coffin, and drew
curtains. Before us in the dim light there lay a woman covered with a
black nun's dress. Only her hands, and the exquisitely beautiful pale
contour of her face (forehead, nose, mouth, and chin, modelled in
purest outline, as though the injury of death had never touched her)
were visible. Her closed eyes seemed to sleep. She had the perfect
peace of Luini's S. Catherine borne by the angels to her grave on Sinai.
I have rarely seen anything which surprised and touched me more. The
religious earnestness of the young custode, the hushed adoration of the
country-folk who had silently assembled round us, intensified the
sympathy-inspiring beauty of the slumbering girl. Could Julia, daughter
of Claudius, have been fairer than this maiden, when the Lombard
workmen found her in her Latin tomb, and brought her to be
worshipped on the Capitol? S. Chiara's shrine was hung round with her
relics; and among these the heart extracted from her body was
suspended. Upon it, apparently wrought into the very substance of the
mummied flesh, were impressed a figure of the crucified Christ, the
scourge, and the five stigmata. The guardian's faith in this miraculous
witness to her sainthood, the gentle piety of the men and women who
knelt before it, checked all expressions of incredulity. We abandoned
ourselves to the genius of the place; forgot even to ask what Santa
Chiara was sleeping here; and withdrew, toned to a not unpleasing
melancholy. The world-famous S. Clair, the spiritual sister of S.
Francis, lies in Assisi. I have often asked myself, Who, then, was this
nun? What history had she? And I think now of this girl as of a damsel
of romance, a Sleeping Beauty in the wood of time, secluded from
intrusive elements of fact, and folded in the love and faith of her own
simple worshippers. Among the hollows of Arcadia, how many rustic
shrines in ancient days held saints of Hellas, apocryphal, perhaps, like
this, but hallowed by tradition and enduring homage![6]
FOLIGNO
In the landscape of Raphael's votive picture, known as the Madonna di
Foligno, there is a town with a few towers, placed upon a broad plain at
the edge of some blue hills. Allowing for that license as to details
which imaginative masters permitted themselves in matters of
subordinate importance, Raphael's sketch is still true to Foligno. The
place has not materially changed since the beginning of the sixteenth
century. Indeed, relatively to the state of Italy at large, it is still the
same as in the days of ancient Rome. Foligno forms a station of
commanding interest between Rome and the Adriatic upon the great
Flaminian Way. At Foligno the passes of the Apennines debouch into
the Umbrian plain, which slopes gradually toward the valley of the
Tiber, and from it the valley of the Nera is reached by an easy ascent
beneath the walls of Spoleto. An army advancing from the north by the
Metaurus and the Furlo Pass must find itself at Foligno; and the level
champaign round the city is well adapted to the maintenance and
exercises of a garrison. In the days of the Republic and the Empire, the
value of this position was well understood; but Foligno's importance, as
the key to the Flaminian Way, was eclipsed by two flourishing cities in
its immediate vicinity, Hispellum and Mevania, the modern Spello and
Bevagna. We might hazard a conjecture that the Lombards, when they
ruled the Duchy of Spoleto, following their usual policy of opposing
new military centres to the ancient Roman municipia, encouraged
Fulginium at the expense of her two neighbours. But of this there is no
certainty to build upon. All that can be affirmed with accuracy is that in
the Middle Ages, while Spello and Bevagna declined into the
inferiority of dependent burghs, Foligno grew in power and became the
chief commune of this part of Umbria. It was famous during the last
centuries of struggle between the Italian burghers and their native
despots, for peculiar ferocity in civil strife. Some of the bloodiest pages
in mediæval Italian history are those which relate the vicissitudes of the
Trinci family, the exhaustion of Foligno by internal discord, and its
final submission to the Papal power. Since railways have been carried
from Rome through Narni and Spoleto to Ancona and Perugia, Foligno
has gained considerably in commercial and military status. It is the
point of intersection for three lines; the Italian government has made it
a great cavalry depôt, and there are signs of reviving traffic in its
decayed streets. Whether the presence of a large garrison has already
modified the population, or whether we may ascribe something to the
absence of Roman municipal institutions in the far past, and to the
savagery of the mediæval period, it is difficult to say. Yet the
impression left by Foligno upon the mind is different from that of
Assisi, Spello, and Montefalco, which are distinguished for a certain
grace and gentleness in their inhabitants.
My window in the city wall looks southward across the plain to Spoleto,
with Montefalco perched aloft upon the right, and Trevi on its
mountain-bracket to the left. From the topmost peaks of the Sabine
Apennines, gradual tender sloping lines descend to find their quiet in
the valley of Clitumnus. The space between me and that distance is
infinitely rich with every sort of greenery, dotted here and there with
towers and relics of baronial houses. The little town is in commotion;
for the working men of Foligno and its neighbourhood have resolved to
spend their earnings on a splendid festa--horse-races, and two nights of
fireworks. The acacias and paulownias on the ramparts are in full
bloom of creamy white and lilac. In the glare of Bengal lights these
trees, with all their pendulous blossoms, surpassed the most fantastic of
artificial decorations. The rockets sent aloft into the sky amid that
solemn Umbrian landscape were nowise out of harmony with nature. I
never sympathised with critics who resent the intrusion of fireworks
upon scenes of natural beauty. The Giessbach, lighted up at so much
per head on stated evenings, with a band playing and a crowd of
cockneys staring, presents perhaps an incongruous spectacle. But where,
as here at Foligno, a whole city has made itself a festival, where there
are multitudes of citizens and soldiers and country-people slowly
moving and gravely admiring, with the decency and order characteristic
of an Italian crowd, I have nothing but a sense of satisfaction.
It is sometimes the traveller's good fortune in some remote place to
meet with an inhabitant who incarnates and interprets for him the
genius loci as he has conceived it. Though his own subjectivity will
assuredly play a considerable part in such an encounter, transferring to
his chance acquaintance qualities he may not possess, and connecting
this personality in some purely imaginative manner with thoughts
derived from study, or impressions made by nature; yet the stranger
will henceforth become the meeting-point of many memories, the
central figure in a composition which derives from him its vividness.
Unconsciously and innocently he has lent himself to the creation of a
picture, and round him, as around the hero of a myth, have gathered
thoughts and sentiments of which he had himself no knowledge. On
one of these nights I had been threading the aisles of acacia-trees, now
glaring red, now azure, as the Bengal lights kept changing. My mind
instinctively went back to scenes of treachery and bloodshed in the
olden time, when Gorrado Trinci paraded the mangled remnants of
three hundred of his victims, heaped on mule-back, through Foligno,
for a warning to the citizens. As the procession moved along the
ramparts, I found myself in contest with a young man, who readily fell
into conversation. He was very tall, with enormous breadth of
shoulders, and long sinewy arms, like Michelangelo's favourite models.
His head was small, curled over with crisp black hair. Low forehead,
and thick level eyebrows absolutely meeting over intensely bright
fierce eyes. The nose descending straight from the brows, as in a statue
of Hadrian's age. The mouth full-lipped, petulant, and passionate above
a firm round chin. He was dressed in the shirt, white trousers, and loose
white jacket of a contadino; but he did not move with a peasant's slouch,
rather with the elasticity and alertness of an untamed panther. He told
me that he was just about to join a cavalry regiment; and I could well
imagine, when military dignity was added to that gait, how grandly he
would go. This young man, of whom I heard nothing more after our
half-hour's conversation among the crackling fireworks and roaring
cannon, left upon my mind an indescribable impression of
dangerousness--of 'something fierce and terrible, eligible to burst forth.'
Of men like this, then, were formed the Companies of Adventure who
flooded Italy with villany, ambition, and lawlessness in the fifteenth
century. Gattamelata, who began life as a baker's boy at Narni and
ended it with a bronze statue by Donatello on the public square in
Padua, was of this breed. Like this were the Trinci and their bands of
murderers. Like this were the bravi who hunted Lorenzaccio to death at
Venice. Like this was Pietro Paolo Baglioni, whose fault, in the eyes of
Machiavelli, was that he could not succeed in being 'perfettamente
tristo.' Beautiful, but inhuman; passionate, but cold; powerful, but
rendered impotent for firm and lofty deeds by immorality and treason;
how many centuries of men like this once wasted Italy and plunged her
into servitude! Yet what material is here, under sterner discipline, and
with a nobler national ideal, for the formation of heroic armies. Of such
stuff, doubtless, were the Roman legionaries. When will the Italians
learn to use these men as Fabius or as Cæsar, not as the Vitelli and the
Trinci used them? In such meditations, deeply stirred by the meeting of
my own reflections with one who seemed to represent for me in life and
blood the spirit of the place which had provoked them, I said farewell
to Cavallucci, and returned to my bedroom on the city wall. The last
rockets had whizzed and the last cannons had thundered ere I fell
asleep.
SPELLO
Spello contains some not inconsiderable antiquities--the remains of a
Roman theatre, a Roman gate with the heads of two men and a woman
leaning over it, and some fragments of Roman sculpture scattered
through its buildings. The churches, especially those of S.M. Maggiore
and S. Francesco, are worth a visit for the sake of Pinturicchio.
Nowhere, except in the Piccolomini Library at Siena, can that master's
work in fresco be better studied than here. The satisfaction with which
he executed the wall paintings in S. Maria Maggiore is testified by his
own portrait introduced upon a panel in the decoration of the Virgin's
chamber. The scrupulously rendered details of books, chairs, window
seats, &c., which he here has copied, remind one of Carpaccio's study
of S. Benedict at Venice. It is all sweet, tender, delicate, and carefully
finished; but without depth, not even the depth of Perugino's feeling. In
S. Francesco, Pinturicchio, with the same meticulous refinement,
painted a letter addressed to him by Gentile Baglioni. It lies on a stool
before Madonna and her court of saints. Nicety of execution, technical
mastery of fresco as a medium for Dutch detail-painting, prettiness of
composition, and cheerfulness of colouring, are noticeable throughout
his work here rather than either thought or sentiment. S. Maria
Maggiore can boast a fresco of Madonna between a young episcopal
saint and Catherine of Alexandria from the hand of Perugino. The rich
yellow harmony of its tones, and the graceful dignity of its emotion,
conveyed no less by a certain Raphaelesque pose and outline than by
suavity of facial expression, enable us to measure the distance between
this painter and his quasi-pupil Pinturicchio.
We did not, however, drive to Spello to inspect either Roman
antiquities or frescoes, but to see an inscription on the city walls about
Orlando. It is a rude Latin elegiac couplet, saying that, 'from the sign
below, men may conjecture the mighty members of Roland, nephew of
Charles; his deeds are written in history.' Three agreeable old
gentlemen of Spello, who attended us with much politeness, and were
greatly interested in my researches, pointed out a mark waist-high upon
the wall, where Orlando's knee is reported to have reached. But I could
not learn anything about a phallic monolith, which is said by Guerin or
Panizzi to have been identified with the Roland myth at Spello. Such a
column either never existed here, or had been removed before the
memory of the present generation.
EASTER MORNING AT ASSISI
We are in the lower church of S. Francesco. High mass is being sung,
with orchestra and organ and a choir of many voices. Candles are
lighted on the altar, over-canopied with Giotto's allegories. From the
low southern windows slants the sun, in narrow bands, upon the
many-coloured gloom and embrowned glory of these painted aisles.
Women in bright kerchiefs kneel upon the stones, and shaggy men
from the mountains stand or lean against the wooden benches. There is
no moving from point to point. Where we have taken our station, at the
north-western angle of the transept, there we stay till mass be over. The
whole low-vaulted building glows duskily; the frescoed roof, the
stained windows, the figure-crowded pavements blending their rich but
subdued colours, like hues upon some marvellous moth's wings, or like
a deep-toned rainbow mist discerned in twilight dreams, or like such
tapestry as Eastern queens, in ancient days, wrought for the pavilion of
an empress. Forth from this maze of mingling tints, indefinite in shade
and sunbeams, lean earnest, saintly faces--ineffably pure--adoring,
pitying, pleading; raising their eyes in ecstasy to heaven, or turning
them in ruth toward earth. Men and women of whom the world was not
worthy--at the hands of those old painters they have received the divine
grace, the dovelike simplicity, whereof Italians in the fourteenth
century possessed the irrecoverable secret. Each face is a poem; the
counterpart in painting to a chapter from the Fioretti di San Francesco.
Over the whole scene--in the architecture, in the frescoes, in the
coloured windows, in the gloom, on the people, in the incense, from the
chiming bells, through the music--broods one spirit: the spirit of him
who was 'the co-espoused, co-transforate with Christ;' the ardent, the
radiant, the beautiful in soul; the suffering, the strong, the simple, the
victorious over self and sin; the celestial who trampled upon earth and
rose on wings of ecstasy to heaven; the Christ-inebriated saint of
visions supersensual and life beyond the grave. Far down below the
feet of those who worship God through him, S. Francis sleeps; but his
soul, the incorruptible part of him, the message he gave the world, is in
the spaces round us. This is his temple. He fills it like an unseen god.
Not as Phoebus or Athene, from their marble pedestals; but as an
abiding spirit, felt everywhere, nowhere seized, absorbing in itself all
mysteries, all myths, all burning exaltations, all abasements, all love,
self-sacrifice, pain, yearning, which the thought of Christ, sweeping the
centuries, hath wrought for men. Let, therefore, choir and congregation
raise their voices on the tide of prayers and praises; for this is Easter
morning--Christ is risen! Our sister, Death of the Body, for whom S.
Francis thanked God in his hymn, is reconciled to us this day, and takes
us by the hand, and leads us to the gate whence floods of heavenly
glory issue from the faces of a multitude of saints. Pray, ye poor people;
chant and pray. If all be but a dream, to wake from this were loss for
you indeed!
PERUSIA AUGUSTA
The piazza in front of the Prefettura is my favourite resort on these
nights of full moon. The evening twilight is made up partly of sunset
fading over Thrasymene and Tuscany; partly of moonrise from the
mountains of Gubbio and the passes toward Ancona. The hills are
capped with snow, although the season is so forward. Below our
parapets the bulk of S. Domenico, with its gaunt perforated tower, and
the finer group of S. Pietro, flaunting the arrowy 'Pennacchio di
Perugia,' jut out upon the spine of hill which dominates the valley of
the Tiber. As the night gloom deepens, and the moon ascends the sky,
these buildings seem to form the sombre foreground to some French
etching. Beyond them spreads the misty moon-irradiated plain of
Umbria. Over all rise shadowy Apennines, with dim suggestions of
Assisi, Spello, Foligno, Montefalco, and Spoleto on their basements.
Little thin whiffs of breezes, very slight and searching, flit across, and
shiver as they pass from Apennine to plain. The slowly moving
population--women in veils, men winter-mantled--pass to and fro
between the buildings and the grey immensity of sky. Bells ring. The
bugles of the soldiers blow retreat in convents turned to barracks.
Young men roam the streets beneath, singing May songs. Far, far away
upon the plain, red through the vitreous moonlight ringed with
thundery gauze, fires of unnamed castelli smoulder. As we lean from
ledges eighty feet in height, gas vies with moon in chequering
illuminations on the ancient walls; Etruscan mouldings, Roman letters,
high-piled hovels, suburban world-old dwellings plastered like martins'
nests against the masonry.
Sunlight adds more of detail to this scene. To the right of Subasio,
where the passes go from Foligno towards Urbino and Ancona, heavy
masses of thundercloud hang every day; but the plain and
hill-buttresses are clear in transparent blueness. First comes Assisi,
with S.M. degli Angeli below; then Spello; then Foligno; then Trevi;
and, far away, Spoleto; with, reared against those misty battlements, the
village height of Montefalco--the 'ringhiera dell' Umbria,' as they call it
in this country. By daylight, the snow on yonder peaks is clearly visible,
where the Monti della Sibilla tower up above the sources of the Nera
and Velino from frigid wastes of Norcia. The lower ranges seem as
though painted, in films of airiest and palest azure, upon china; and
then comes the broad green champaign, flecked with villages and farms.
Just at the basement of Perugia winds Tiber, through sallows and grey
poplar-trees, spanned by ancient arches of red brick, and guarded here
and there by castellated towers. The mills beneath their dams and weirs
are just as Raphael drew them; and the feeling of air and space reminds
one, on each coign of vantage, of some Umbrian picture. Every
hedgerow is hoary with May-bloom and honeysuckle. The oaks hang
out their golden-dusted tassels. Wayside shrines are decked with
laburnum boughs and iris blossoms plucked from the copse-woods,
where spires of purple and pink orchis variegate the thin, fine grass.
The land waves far and wide with young corn, emerald green beneath
the olive-trees, which take upon their under-foliage tints reflected from
this verdure or red tones from the naked earth. A fine race of contadini,
with large, heroically graceful forms, and beautiful dark eyes and noble
faces, move about this garden, intent on ancient, easy tillage of the kind
Saturnian soil.
LA MAGIONE
On the road from Perugia to Cortona, the first stage ends at La Magione,
a high hill-village commanding the passage from the Umbrian
champaign to the lake of Thrasymene.
It has a grim square fortalice above it, now in ruins, and a stately castle
to the south-east, built about the time of Braccio. Here took place that
famous diet of Cesare Borgia's enemies, when the son of Alexander VI.
was threatening Bologna with his arms, and bidding fair to make
himself supreme tyrant of Italy in 1502. It was the policy of Cesare to
fortify himself by reducing the fiefs of the Church to submission, and
by rooting out the dynasties which had acquired a sort of tyranny in
Papal cities. The Varani of Camerino and the Manfredi of Faenza had
been already extirpated. There was only too good reason to believe that
the turn of the Vitelli at Città di Castello, of the Baglioni at Perugia,
and of the Bentivogli at Bologna would come next. Pandolfo Petrucci
at Siena, surrounded on all sides by Cesare's conquests, and specially
menaced by the fortification of Piombino, felt himself in danger. The
great house of the Orsini, who swayed a large part of the Patrimony of
S. Peter's, and were closely allied to the Vitelli, had even graver cause
for anxiety. But such was the system of Italian warfare, that nearly all
these noble families lived by the profession of arms, and most of them
were in the pay of Cesare. When, therefore, the conspirators met at La
Magione, they were plotting against a man whose money they had
taken, and whom they had hitherto aided in his career of fraud and
spoliation.
The diet consisted of the Cardinal Orsini, an avowed antagonist of
Alexander VI.; his brother Paolo, the chieftain of the clan; Vitellozzo
Vitelli, lord of Città di Castello; Gian-Paolo Baglioni, made undisputed
master of Perugia by the recent failure of his cousin Grifonetto's
treason; Oliverotto, who had just acquired the March of Fermo by the
murder of his uncle Giovanni da Fogliani; Ermes Bentivoglio, the heir
of Bologna; and Antonio da Venafro, the secretary of Pandolfo Petrueci.
These men vowed hostility on the basis of common injuries and
common fear against the Borgia. But they were for the most part
stained themselves with crime, and dared not trust each other, and
could not gain the confidence of any respectable power in Italy except
the exiled Duke of Urbino. Procrastination was the first weapon used
by the wily Cesare, who trusted that time would sow among his rebel
captains suspicion and dissension. He next made overtures to the
leaders separately, and so far succeeded in his perfidious policy as to
draw Vitellozzo Vitelli, Oliverotto da Fermo, Paolo Orsini, and
Francesco Orsini, Duke of Gravina, into his nets at Sinigaglia. Under
pretext of fair conference and equitable settlement of disputed claims,
he possessed himself of their persons, and had them strangled--two
upon December 31, and two upon January 18, 1503. Of all Cesare's
actions, this was the most splendid for its successful combination of
sagacity and policy in the hour of peril, of persuasive diplomacy, and of
ruthless decision when the time to strike his blow arrived.
CORTONA
After leaving La Magione, the road descends upon the lake of
Thrasymene through oak-woods full of nightingales. The lake lay
basking, leaden-coloured, smooth and waveless, under a misty,
rain-charged, sun-irradiated sky. At Passignano, close beside its shore,
we stopped for mid-day. This is a little fishing village of very poor
people, who live entirely by labour on the waters. They showed us huge
eels coiled in tanks, and some fine specimens of the silver carp--Reina
del Lago. It was off one of the eels that we made our lunch; and taken,
as he was, alive from his cool lodging, he furnished a series of dishes
fit for a king.
Climbing the hill of Cortona seemed a quite interminable business. It
poured a deluge. Our horses were tired, and one lean donkey, who,
after much trouble, was produced from a farmhouse and yoked in front
of them, rendered but little assistance.
Next day we duly saw the Muse and Lamp in the Museo, the Fra
Angelicos, and all the Signorellis. One cannot help thinking that too
much fuss is made nowadays about works of art--running after them for
their own sakes, exaggerating their importance, and detaching them as
objects of study, instead of taking them with sympathy and carelessness
as pleasant or instructive adjuncts to our actual life. Artists, historians
of art, and critics are forced to isolate pictures; and it is of profit to their
souls to do so. But simple folk, who have no aesthetic vocation,
whether creative or critical, suffer more than is good for them by
compliance with mere fashion. Sooner or later we shall return to the
spirit of the ages which produced these pictures, and which regarded
them with less of an industrious bewilderment than they evoke at
present.
I am far indeed from wishing to decry art, the study of art, or the
benefits to be derived from its intelligent enjoyment. I only mean to
suggest that we go the wrong way to work at present in this matter.
Picture and sculpture galleries accustom us to the separation of art from
life. Our methods of studying art, making a beginning of art-study
while traveling, tend to perpetuate this separation. It is only on
reflection, after long experience, that we come to perceive that the most
fruitful moments in our art education have been casual and unsought, in
quaint nooks and unexpected places, where nature, art, and life are
happily blent.
The Palace of the Commune at Cortona is interesting because of the
shields of Florentine governors, sculptured on blocks of grey stone, and
inserted in its outer walls--Peruzzi, Albizzi, Strozzi, Salviati, among the
more ancient--de' Medici at a later epoch. The revolutions in the
Republic of Florence may be read by a herald from these coats-of-arms
and the dates beneath them.
The landscape of this Tuscan highland satisfies me more and more with
sense of breadth and beauty. From S. Margherita above the town the
prospect is immense and wonderful and wild--up into those brown,
forbidding mountains; down to the vast plain; and over to the cities of
Chiusi, Montepulciano, and Foiano. The jewel of the view is
Trasimeno, a silvery shield encased with serried hills, and set upon one
corner of the scene, like a precious thing apart and meant for separate
contemplation. There is something in the singularity and circumscribed
completeness of the mountain-girded lake, diminished by distance,
which would have attracted Lionardo da Vinci's pencil, had he seen it.
Cortona seems desperately poor, and the beggars are intolerable. One
little blind boy, led by his brother, both frightfully ugly and ragged
urchins, pursued us all over the city, incessantly whining 'Signore
Padrone!' It was only on the threshold of the inn that I ventured to give
them a few coppers, for I knew well that any public beneficence would
raise the whole swarm of the begging population round us. Sitting later
in the day upon the piazza of S. Domenico, I saw the same blind boy
taken by his brother to play. The game consists, in the little creature
throwing his arms about the trunk of a big tree, and running round and
round it, clasping it. This seemed to make him quite inexpressibly
happy. His face lit up and beamed with that inner beatitude blind
people show--a kind of rapture shining over it, as though nothing could
be more altogether delightful. This little boy had the smallpox at eight
months, and has never been able to see since. He looks sturdy, and may
live to be of any age--doomed always, is that possible, to beg?
CHIUSI
What more enjoyable dinner can be imagined than a flask of excellent
Montepulciano, a well-cooked steak, and a little goat's cheese in the inn
of the Leone d'Oro at Chiusi? The windows are open, and the sun is
setting. Monte Cetona bounds the view to the right, and the wooded
hills of Città della Pieve to the left. The deep green dimpled valley goes
stretching away toward Orvieto; and at its end a purple mountain mass,
distinct and solitary, which may peradventure be Soracte! The near
country is broken into undulating hills, forested with fine olives and
oaks; and the composition of the landscape, with its crowning villages,
is worthy of a background to an Umbrian picture. The breadth and
depth and quiet which those painters loved, the space of lucid sky, the
suggestion of winding waters in verdant fields, all are here. The
evening is beautiful--golden light streaming softly from behind us on
this prospect, and gradually mellowing to violet and blue with stars
above.
At Chiusi we visited several Etruscan tombs, and saw their red and
black scrawled pictures. One of the sepulchres was a well-jointed vault
of stone with no wall-paintings. The rest had been scooped out of the
living tufa. This was the excuse for some pleasant hours spent in
walking and driving through the country. Chiusi means for me the
mingling of grey olives and green oaks in limpid sunlight; deep leafy
lanes; warm sandstone banks; copses with nightingales and cyclamens
and cuckoos; glimpses of a silvery lake; blue shadowy distances; the
bristling ridge of Monte Cetona; the conical towers, Becca di Questo
and Becca di Quello, over against each other on the borders; ways
winding among hedgerows like some bit of England in June, but not so
full of flowers. It means all this, I fear, for me far more than theories
about Lars Porsenna and Etruscan ethnology.
GUBBIO
Gubbio ranks among the most ancient of Italian hill-towns. With its
back set firm against the spine of central Apennines, and piled, house
over house, upon the rising slope, it commands a rich tract of upland
champaign, bounded southward toward Perugia and Foligno by peaked
and rolling ridges. This amphitheatre, which forms its source of wealth
and independence, is admirably protected by a chain of natural
defences; and Gubbio wears a singularly old-world aspect of antiquity
and isolation. Houses climb right to the crests of gaunt bare peaks; and
the brown mediæval walls with square towers which protected them
upon the mountain side, following the inequalities of the ground, are
still a marked feature in the landscape. It is a town of steep streets and
staircases, with quaintly framed prospects, and solemn vistas opening
at every turn across the lowland. One of these views might be selected
for especial notice. In front, irregular buildings losing themselves in
country as they straggle by the roadside; then the open post-road with a
cypress to the right; afterwards, the rich green fields, and on a bit of
rising ground an ancient farmhouse with its brown dependencies; lastly,
the blue hills above Fossato, and far away a wrack of tumbling clouds.
All this enclosed by the heavy archway of the Porta Romana, where
sunlight and shadow chequer the mellow tones of a dim fresco,
indistinct with age, but beautiful.
Gubbio has not greatly altered since the middle ages. But poor people
are now living in the palaces of noblemen and merchants. These new
inhabitants have walled up the fair arched windows and slender portals
of the ancient dwellers, spoiling the beauty of the streets without
materially changing the architectural masses. In that witching hour
when the Italian sunset has faded, and a solemn grey replaces the
glowing tones of daffodil and rose, it is not difficult, here dreaming by
oneself alone, to picture the old noble life--the ladies moving along
those open loggias, the young men in plumed caps and curling hair
with one foot on those doorsteps, the knights in armour and the sumpter
mules and red-robed Cardinals defiling through those gates into the
courts within. The modern bricks and mortar with which that
picturesque scene has been overlaid, the ugly oblong windows and
bright green shutters which now interrupt the flowing lines of arch and
gallery; these disappear beneath the fine remembered touch of a sonnet
sung by Folgore, when still the Parties had their day, and this deserted
city was the centre of great aims and throbbing aspirations.
The names of the chief buildings in Gubbio are strongly suggestive of
the middle ages. They abut upon a Piazza de' Signori. One of them, the
Palazzo del Municipio, is a shapeless unfinished block of masonry. It is
here that the Eugubine tables, plates of brass with Umbrian and Roman
incised characters, are shown. The Palazzo de' Consoli has higher
architectural qualities, and is indeed unique among Italian palaces for
the combination of massiveness with lightness in a situation of
unprecedented boldness. Rising from enormous substructures mortised
into the solid hillside, it rears its vast rectangular bulk to a giddy height
above the town; airy loggias imposed on great forbidding masses of
brown stone, shooting aloft into a light aërial tower. The empty halls
inside are of fair proportions and a noble size, and the views from the
open colonnades in all directions fascinate. But the final impression
made by the building is one of square, tranquil, massive
strength--perpetuity embodied in masonry--force suggesting facility by
daring and successful addition of elegance to hugeness. Vast as it is,
this pile is not forbidding, as a similarly weighty structure in the North
would be. The fine quality of the stone and the delicate though simple
mouldings of the windows give it an Italian grace.
These public palaces belong to the age of the Communes, when Gubbio
was a free town, with a policy of its own, and an important part to play
in the internecine struggles of Pope and Empire, Guelf and Ghibelline.
The ruined, deserted, degraded Palazzo Ducale reminds us of the
advent of the despots. It has been stripped of all its tarsia-work and
sculpture. Only here and there a Fe.D., with the cupping-glass of
Federigo di Montefeltro, remains to show that Gubbio once became the
fairest fief of the Urbino duchy. S. Ubaldo, who gave his name to this
duke's son, was the patron of Gubbio, and to him the cathedral is
dedicated--one low enormous vault, like a cellar or feudal banqueting
hall, roofed with a succession of solid Gothic arches. This strange old
church, and the House of Canons, buttressed on the hill beside it, have
suffered less from modernisation than most buildings in Gubbio. The
latter, in particular, helps one to understand what this city of grave
palazzi must have been, and how the mere opening of old doors and
windows would restore it to its primitive appearance. The House of the
Canons has, in fact, not yet been given over to the use of middle-class
and proletariate.
At the end of a day in Gubbio, it is pleasant to take our ease in the
primitive hostelry, at the back of which foams a mountain-torrent,
rushing downward from the Apennines. The Gubbio wine is very
fragrant, and of a rich ruby colour. Those to whom the tints of wine and
jewels give a pleasure not entirely childish, will take delight in its
specific blending of tawny hues with rose. They serve the table still, at
Gubbio, after the antique Italian fashion, covering it with a
cream-coloured linen cloth bordered with coarse lace--the creases of
the press, the scent of old herbs from the wardrobe, are still upon
it--and the board is set with shallow dishes of warm, white earthenware,
basket-worked in open lattice at the edge, which contain little separate
messes of meat, vegetables, cheese, and comfits. The wine stands in
strange, slender phials of smooth glass, with stoppers; and the
amber-coloured bread lies in fair round loaves upon the cloth. Dining
thus is like sitting down to the supper at Emmaus, in some picture of
Gian Bellini or of Masolino. The very bareness of the room--its open
rafters, plastered walls, primitive settees, and red-brick floor, on which
a dog sits waiting for a bone--enhances the impression of artistic
delicacy in the table.
FROM GUBBIO TO FANO
The road from Gubbio, immediately after leaving the city, enters a
narrow Alpine ravine, where a thin stream dashes over dark, red rocks,
and pendent saxifrages wave to the winds. The carriage in which we
travelled at the end of May, one morning, had two horses, which our
driver soon supplemented with a couple of white oxen. Slowly and
toilsomely we ascended between the flanks of barren hills--gaunt
masses of crimson and grey crag, clothed at their summits with short
turf and scanty pasture. The pass leads first to the little town of
Scheggia, and is called the Monte Calvo, or bald mountain. At
Scheggia, it joins the great Flaminian Way, or North road of the Roman
armies. At the top there is a fine view over the conical hills that
dominate Gubbio, and, far away, to noble mountains above the Furlo
and the Foligno line of railway to Ancona. Range rises over range,
crossing at unexpected angles, breaking into sudden precipices, and
stretching out long, exquisitely modelled outlines, as only Apennines
can do, in silvery sobriety of colours toned by clearest air. Every square
piece of this austere, wild landscape forms a varied picture, whereof the
composition is due to subtle arrangements of lines always delicate; and
these lines seem somehow to have been determined in their beauty by
the vast antiquity of the mountain system, as though they all had taken
time to choose their place and wear down into harmony. The effect of
tempered sadness was heightened for us by stormy lights and dun
clouds, high in air, rolling vapours and flying shadows, over all the
prospect, tinted in ethereal grisaille.
After Scheggia, one enters a land of meadow and oak-trees. This is the
sacred central tract of Jupiter Apenninus, whose fane-Delubra Jovis saxoque minantes Apenninigenis cultae pastoribus arae
--once rose behind us on the bald Iguvian summits. A second little pass
leads from this region to the Adriatic side of the Italian watershed, and
the road now follows the Barano downward toward the sea. The valley
is fairly green with woods, where mistletoe may here and there be seen
on boughs of oak, and rich with cornfields. Cagli is the chief town of
the district, and here they show one of the best pictures left to us by
Raphael's father, Giovanni Santi. It is a Madonna, attended by S. Peter,
S. Francis, S. Dominic, S. John, and two angels. One of the angels is
traditionally supposed to have been painted from the boy Raphael, and
the face has something which reminds us of his portraits. The whole
composition, excellent in modelling, harmonious in grouping, soberly
but strongly coloured, with a peculiar blending of dignity and
sweetness, grace and vigour, makes one wonder why Santi thought it
necessary to send his son from his own workshop to study under
Perugino. He was himself a master of his art, and this, perhaps the most
agreeable of his paintings, has a masculine sincerity which is absent
from at least the later works of Perugino.
Some miles beyond Cagli, the real pass of the Furlo begins. It owes its
name to a narrow tunnel bored by Vespasian in the solid rock, where
limestone crags descend on the Barano. The Romans called this gallery
Petra Pertusa, or Intercisa, or more familiarly Forulus, whence comes
the modern name. Indeed, the stations on the old Flaminian Way are
still well marked by Latin designations; for Cagli is the ancient Calles,
and Fossombrone is Forum Sempronii, and Fano the Fanum Fortunæ.
Vespasian commemorated this early achievement in engineering by an
inscription carved on the living stone, which still remains; and
Claudian, when he sang the journey of his Emperor Honorius from
Rimini to Rome, speaks thus of what was even then an object of
astonishment to travellers:-Laetior hinc fano recipit fortuna vetusto, Despiciturque vagus praerupta
valle Metaurus, Qua mons arte patens vivo se perforat arcu Admittitque
viam sectae per viscera rupis.
The Forulus itself may now be matched, on any Alpine pass, by several
tunnels of far mightier dimensions; for it is narrow, and does not extend
more than 126 feet in length. But it occupies a fine position at the end
of a really imposing ravine. The whole Furlo Pass might, without too
much exaggeration, be described as a kind of Cheddar on the scale of
the Via Mala. The limestone rocks, which rise on either hand above the
gorge to an enormous height, are noble in form and solemn, like a
succession of gigantic portals, with stupendous flanking obelisks and
pyramids. Some of these crag-masses rival the fantastic cliffs of Capri,
and all consist of that southern mountain limestone which changes from
pale yellow to blue grey and dusky orange. A river roars precipitately
through the pass, and the roadsides wave with many sorts of
campanulas--a profusion of azure and purple bells upon the hard white
stone. Of Roman remains there is still enough (in the way of Roman
bridges and bits of broken masonry) to please an antiquary's eye. But
the lover of nature will dwell chiefly on the picturesque qualities of this
historic gorge, so alien to the general character of Italian scenery, and
yet so remote from anything to which Swiss travelling accustoms one.
The Furlo breaks out into a richer land of mighty oaks and waving
cornfields, a fat pastoral country, not unlike Devonshire in detail, with
green uplands, and wild-rose tangled hedgerows, and much running
water, and abundance of summer flowers. At a point above
Fossombrone, the Barano joins the Metauro, and here one has a
glimpse of faraway Urbino, high upon its mountain eyrie. It is so rare,
in spite of immemorial belief, to find in Italy a wilderness of wild
flowers, that I feel inclined to make a list of those I saw from our
carriage windows as we rolled down lazily along the road to
Fossombrone. Broom, and cytisus, and hawthorn mingled with roses,
gladiolus, and sainfoin. There were orchises, and clematis, and privet,
and wild-vine, vetches of all hues, red poppies, sky-blue cornflowers,
and lilac pimpernel. In the rougher hedges, dogwood, honeysuckle,
pyracanth, and acacia made a network of white bloom and blushes.
Milk-worts of all bright and tender tints combined with borage, iris,
hawkweeds, harebells, crimson clover, thyme, red snap-dragon, golden
asters, and dreamy love-in-a-mist, to weave a marvellous carpet such as
the looms of Shiraz or of Cashmere never spread. Rarely have I gazed
on Flora in such riot, such luxuriance, such self-abandonment to joy.
The air was filled with fragrances. Songs of cuckoos and nightingales
echoed from the copses on the hillsides. The sun was out, and dancing
over all the landscape.
After all this, Fano was very restful in the quiet sunset. It has a sandy
stretch of shore, on which the long, green-yellow rollers of the Adriatic
broke into creamy foam, beneath the waning saffron light over Pesaro
and the rosy rising of a full moon. This Adriatic sea carries an English
mind home to many a little watering-place upon our coast. In colour
and the shape of waves it resembles our Channel.
The sea-shore is Fano's great attraction; but the town has many
churches, and some creditable pictures, as well as Roman antiquities.
Giovanni Santi may here be seen almost as well as at Cagli; and of
Perugino there is one truly magnificent altar-piece--lunette, great centre
panel, and predella--dusty in its present condition, but splendidly
painted, and happily not yet restored or cleaned. It is worth journeying
to Fano to see this. Still better would the journey be worth the
traveller's while if he could be sure to witness such a game of Pallone
as we chanced upon in the Via dell' Arco di Augusto--lads and
grown-men, tightly girt, in shirt sleeves, driving the great ball aloft into
the air with cunning bias and calculation of projecting house-eaves. I
do not understand the game; but it was clearly played something after
the manner of our football, that is to say; with sides, and front and back
players so arranged as to cover the greatest number of angles of
incidence on either wall.
Fano still remembers that it is the Fane of Fortune. On the fountain in
the market-place stands a bronze Fortuna, slim and airy, offering her
veil to catch the wind. May she long shower health and prosperity upon
the modern watering-place of which she is the patron saint!
*****
THE PALACE OF URBINO
I
At Rimini, one spring, the impulse came upon my wife and me to make
our way across San Marino to Urbino. In the Piazza, called
apocryphally after Julius Cæsar, I found a proper vetturino, with a good
carriage and two indefatigable horses. He was a splendid fellow, and
bore a great historic name, as I discovered when our bargain was
completed. 'What are you called?' I asked him. 'Filippo Visconti, per
servirla!' was the prompt reply. Brimming over with the darkest
memories of the Italian Renaissance, I hesitated when I heard this
answer. The associations seemed too ominous. And yet the man
himself was so attractive--tall, stalwart, and well looking--no feature of
his face or limb of his athletic form recalling the gross tyrant who
concealed worse than Caligula's ugliness from sight in secret
chambers--that I shook this preconception from my mind. As it turned
out, Filippo Visconti had nothing in common with his infamous
namesake but the name. On a long and trying journey, he showed
neither sullen nor yet ferocious tempers; nor, at the end of it, did he
attempt by any master-stroke of craft to wheedle from me more than his
fair pay; but took the meerschaum pipe I gave him for a keepsake, with
the frank goodwill of an accomplished gentleman. The only exhibition
of his hot Italian blood which I remember did his humanity credit.
While we were ascending a steep hillside, he jumped from his box to
thrash a ruffian by the roadside for brutal treatment to a little boy. He
broke his whip, it is true, in this encounter; risked a dangerous quarrel;
and left his carriage, with myself and wife inside it, to the mercy of his
horses in a somewhat perilous position. But when he came back, hot
and glowing, from this deed of justice, I could only applaud his zeal.
An Italian of this type, handsome as an antique statue, with the
refinement of a modern gentleman and that intelligence which is innate
in a race of immemorial culture, is a fascinating being. He may be
absolutely ignorant in all book-learning. He may be as ignorant as a
Bersagliere from Montalcino with whom I once conversed at Rimini,
who gravely said that he could walk in three months to North America,
and thought of doing it when his term of service was accomplished. But
he will display, as this young soldier did, a grace and ease of address
which are rare in London drawing-rooms; and by his shrewd remarks
upon the cities he has visited, will show that he possesses a fine natural
taste for things of beauty. The speech of such men, drawn from the
common stock of the Italian people, is seasoned with proverbial
sayings, the wisdom of centuries condensed in a few nervous words.
When emotion fires their brain, they break into spontaneous eloquence,
or suggest the motive of a poem by phrases pregnant with imagery.
For the first stage of the journey out of Rimini, Filippo's two horses
sufficed. The road led almost straight across the level between quickset
hedges in white bloom. But when we reached the long steep hill which
ascends to San Marino, the inevitable oxen were called out, and we
toiled upwards leisurely through cornfields bright with red anemones
and sweet narcissus. At this point pomegranate hedges replaced the
May-thorns of the plain. In course of time our bovi brought us to the
Borgo, or lower town, whence there is a further ascent of seven
hundred feet to the topmost hawk's-nest or acropolis of the republic.
These we climbed on foot, watching the view expand around us and
beneath. Crags of limestone here break down abruptly to the rolling
hills, which go to lose themselves in field and shore. Misty reaches of
the Adriatic close the world to eastward. Cesena, Rimini, Verucchio,
and countless hill-set villages, each isolated on its tract of verdure
conquered from the stern grey soil, define the points where Montefeltri
wrestled with Malatestas in long bygone years. Around are marly
mountain-flanks in wrinkles and gnarled convolutions like some giant's
brain, furrowed by rivers crawling through dry wasteful beds of shingle.
Interminable ranges of gaunt Apennines stretch, tier by tier, beyond;
and over all this landscape, a grey-green mist of rising crops and
new-fledged oak-trees lies like a veil upon the nakedness of Nature's
ruins.
Nothing in Europe conveys a more striking sense of geological
antiquity than such a prospect. The denudation and abrasion of
innumerable ages, wrought by slow persistent action of weather and
water on an upheaved mountain mass, are here made visible. Every
wave in that vast sea of hills, every furrow in their worn flanks, tells its
tale of a continuous corrosion still in progress. The dominant
impression is one of melancholy. We forget how Romans,
countermarching Carthaginians, trod the land beneath us. The marvel of
San Marino, retaining independence through the drums and tramplings
of the last seven centuries, is swallowed in a deeper sense of wonder.
We turn instinctively in thought to Leopardi's musings on man's destiny
at war with unknown nature-forces and malignant rulers of the
universe.
Omai disprezza Te, la natura, il brutto Poter che, ascoso, a comun
danno impera, E l' infinita vanità del tutto.
And then, straining our eyes southward, we sweep the dim blue
distance for Recanati, and remember that the poet of modern despair
and discouragement was reared in even such a scene as this.
The town of San Marino is grey, narrow-streeted, simple; with a great,
new, decent, Greek-porticoed cathedral, dedicated to the eponymous
saint. A certain austerity defines it from more picturesque hill-cities
with a less uniform history. There is a marble statue of S. Marino in the
choir of his church; and in his cell is shown the stone bed and pillow on
which he took austere repose. One narrow window near the saint's
abode commands a proud but melancholy landscape of distant hills and
seaboard. To this, the great absorbing charm of San Marino, our eyes
instinctively, recurrently, take flight. It is a landscape which by variety
and beauty thralls attention, but which by its interminable sameness
might grow almost overpowering. There is no relief. The gladness shed
upon far humbler Northern lands in May is ever absent here. The
German word Gemüthlichkeit, the English phrase 'a home of ancient
peace,' are here alike by art and nature untranslated into visibilities.
And yet (as we who gaze upon it thus are fain to think) if peradventure
the intolerable ennui of this panorama should drive a citizen of San
Marino into out-lands, the same view would haunt him whithersoever
he went--the swallows of his native eyrie would shrill through his
sleep--he would yearn to breathe its fine keen air in winter, and to
watch its iris-hedges deck themselves with blue in spring;--like Virgil's
hero, dying, he would think of San Marino: Aspicit, et dulces moriens
reminiscitur Argos. Even a passing stranger may feel the mingled
fascination and oppression of this prospect--the monotony which
maddens, the charm which at a distance grows upon the mind,
environing it with memories.
Descending to the Borgo, we found that Filippo Visconti had ordered a
luncheon of excellent white bread, pigeons, and omelette, with the best
red muscat wine I ever drank, unless the sharp air of the hills deceived
my appetite. An Italian history of San Marino, including its statutes, in
three volumes, furnished intellectual food. But I confess to having
learned from these pages little else than this: first, that the survival of
the Commonwealth through all phases of European politics had been
semi-miraculous; secondly, that the most eminent San Marinesi had
been lawyers. It is possible on a hasty deduction from these two
propositions (to which, however, I am far from wishing to commit
myself), that the latter is a sufficient explanation of the former.
From San Marino the road plunges at a break-neck pace. We are now in
the true Feltrian highlands, whence the Counts of Montefeltro issued in
the twelfth century. Yonder eyrie is San Leo, which formed the key of
entrance to the duchy of Urbino in campaigns fought many hundred
years ago. Perched on the crest of a precipitous rock, this fortress looks
as though it might defy all enemies but famine. And yet San Leo was
taken and re-taken by strategy and fraud, when Montefeltro, Borgia,
Malatesta, Rovere, contended for dominion in these valleys. Yonder is
Sta. Agata, the village to which Guidobaldo fled by night when
Valentino drove him from his dukedom. A little farther towers
Carpegna, where one branch of the Montefeltro house maintained a
countship through seven centuries, and only sold their fief to Rome in
1815. Monte Coppiolo lies behind, Pietra Rubia in front: two other
eagles' nests of the same brood. What a road it is!
It beats the tracks on Exmoor. The uphill and downhill of Devonshire
scorns compromise or mitigation by détour and zigzag. But here
geography is on a scale so far more vast, and the roadway is so far
worse metalled than with us in England--knotty masses of talc and
nodes of sandstone cropping up at dangerous turnings--that only
Dante's words describe the journey:-Vassi in Sanleo, e discendesi in Noli, Montasi su Bismantova in
cacume Con esso i piè; ma qui convien ch' uom voli.
Of a truth, our horses seemed rather to fly than scramble up and down
these rugged precipices; Visconti cheerily animating them with the
brave spirit that was in him, and lending them his wary driver's help of
hand and voice at need.
We were soon upon a cornice-road between the mountains and the
Adriatic: following the curves of gulch and cleft ravine; winding round
ruined castles set on points of vantage; the sea-line high above their
grass-grown battlements, the shadow-dappled champaign girdling their
bastions mortised on the naked rock. Except for the blue lights across
the distance, and the ever-present sea, these earthy Apennines would be
too grim. Infinite air and this spare veil of spring-tide greenery on field
and forest soothe their sternness. Two rivers, swollen by late rains, had
to be forded. Through one of these, the Foglia, bare-legged peasants led
the way. The horses waded to their bellies in the tawny water. Then
more hills and vales; green nooks with rippling corn-crops; secular
oaks attired in golden leafage. The clear afternoon air rang with the
voices of a thousand larks overhead. The whole world seemed
quivering with light and delicate ethereal sound. And yet my mind
turned irresistibly to thoughts of war, violence, and pillage. How often
has this intermediate land been fought over by Montefeltro and
Brancaleoni, by Borgia and Malatesta, by Medici and Della Rovere! Its
contadini are robust men, almost statuesque in build, and beautiful of
feature. No wonder that the Princes of Urbino, with such materials to
draw from, sold their service and their troops to Florence, Rome, S.
Mark, and Milan. The bearing of these peasants is still soldierly and
proud. Yet they are not sullen or forbidding like the Sicilians, whose
habits of life, for the rest, much resemble theirs. The villages, there as
here, are few and far between, perched high on rocks, from which the
folk descend to till the ground and reap the harvest. But the southern
brusquerie and brutality are absent from this district. The men have
something of the dignity and slow-eyed mildness of their own huge
oxen. As evening fell, more solemn Apennines upreared themselves to
southward. The Monte d'Asdrubale, Monte Nerone, and Monte Catria
hove into sight. At last, when light was dim, a tower rose above the
neighbouring ridge, a broken outline of some city barred the sky-line.
Urbino stood before us. Our long day's march was at an end.
The sunset was almost spent, and a four days' moon hung above the
western Apennines, when we took our first view of the palace. It is a
fancy-thralling work of wonder seen in that dim twilight; like some
castle reared by Atlante's magic for imprisonment of Ruggiero, or
palace sought in fairyland by Astolf winding his enchanted horn.
Where shall we find its like, combining, as it does, the buttressed
battlemented bulk of mediæval strongholds with the airy balconies,
suspended gardens, and fantastic turrets of Italian pleasure-houses?
This unique blending of the feudal past with the Renaissance spirit of
the time when it was built, connects it with the art of Ariosto--or more
exactly with Boiardo's epic. Duke Federigo planned his palace at
Urbino just at the moment when the Count of Scandiano had began to
chaunt his lays of Roland in the Castle of Ferrara. Chivalry, transmuted
by the Italian genius into something fanciful and quaint, survived as a
frail work of art. The men-at-arms of the Condottieri still glittered in
gilded hauberks. Their helmets waved with plumes and bizarre crests.
Their surcoats blazed with heraldries; their velvet caps with medals
bearing legendary emblems. The pomp and circumstance of feudal war
had not yet yielded to the cannon of the Gascon or the Switzer's pike.
The fatal age of foreign invasions had not begun for Italy. Within a few
years Charles VIII.'s holiday excursion would reveal the internal
rottenness and weakness of her rival states, and the peninsula for half a
century to come would be drenched in the blood of Frenchmen,
Germans, Spaniards, fighting for her cities as their prey. But now
Lorenzo de' Medici was still alive. The famous policy which bears his
name held Italy suspended for a golden time in false tranquillity and
independence. The princes who shared his culture and his love of art
were gradually passing into modern noblemen, abandoning the savage
feuds and passions of more virile centuries, yielding to luxury and
scholarly enjoyments. The castles were becoming courts, and
despotisms won by force were settling into dynasties.
It was just at this epoch that Duke Federigo built his castle at Urbino.
One of the ablest and wealthiest Condottieri of his time, one of the best
instructed and humanest of Italian princes, he combined in himself the
qualities which mark that period of transition. And these he impressed
upon his dwelling-house, which looks backward to the mediæval
fortalice and forward to the modern palace. This makes it the just
embodiment in architecture of Italian romance, the perfect analogue of
the 'Orlando Innamorato.' By comparing it with the castle of the Estes
at Ferrara and the Palazzo del Te of the Gonzagas at Mantua, we place
it in its right position between mediæval and Renaissance Italy,
between the age when principalities arose upon the ruins of commercial
independence and the age when they became dynastic under Spain.
The exigencies of the ground at his disposal forced Federigo to give the
building an irregular outline. The fine façade, with its embayed loggie
and flanking turrets, is placed too close upon the city ramparts for its
due effect. We are obliged to cross the deep ravine which separates it
from a lower quarter of the town, and take our station near the Oratory
of S. Giovanni Battista, before we can appreciate the beauty of its
design, or the boldness of the group it forms with the cathedral dome
and tower and the square masses of numerous out-buildings. Yet this
peculiar position of the palace, though baffling to a close observer of its
details, is one of singular advantage to the inhabitants. Set on the verge
of Urbino's towering eminence, it fronts a wave-tossed sea of vales and
mountain summits toward the rising and the setting sun. There is
nothing but illimitable air between the terraces and loggias of the
Duchess's apartments and the spreading pyramid of Monte Catria.
A nobler scene is nowhere swept from palace windows than this, which
Castiglione touched in a memorable passage at the end of his
'Cortegiano.' To one who in our day visits Urbino, it is singular how the
slight indications of this sketch, as in some silhouette, bring back the
antique life, and link the present with the past--a hint, perhaps, for
reticence in our descriptions. The gentlemen and ladies of the court had
spent a summer night in long debate on love, rising to the height of
mystical Platonic rapture on the lips of Bembo, when one of them
exclaimed, 'The day has broken!' 'He pointed to the light which was
beginning to enter by the fissures of the windows. Whereupon we flung
the casements wide upon that side of the palace which looks toward the
high peak of Monte Catria, and saw that a fair dawn of rosy hue was
born already in the eastern skies, and all the stars had vanished except
the sweet regent of the heaven of Venus, who holds the borderlands of
day and night; and from her sphere it seemed as though a gentle wind
were breathing, filling the air with eager freshness, and waking among
the numerous woods upon the neighbouring hills the sweet-toned
symphonies of joyous birds.'
II
The House of Montefeltro rose into importance early in the twelfth
century. Frederick Barbarossa erected their fief into a county in 1160.
Supported by imperial favour, they began to exercise an undefined
authority over the district, which they afterwards converted into a
duchy. But, though Ghibelline for several generations, the Montefeltri
were too near neighbours of the Papal power to free themselves from
ecclesiastical vassalage. Therefore in 1216 they sought and obtained
the title of Vicars of the Church. Urbino acknowledged them as
semi-despots in their double capacity of Imperial and Papal deputies.
Cagli and Gubbio followed in the fourteenth century. In the fifteenth,
Castel Durante was acquired from the Brancaleoni by warfare, and
Fossombrone from the Malatestas by purchase. Numerous fiefs and
villages fell into their hands upon the borders of Rimini in the course of
a continued struggle with the House of Malatesta: and when Fano and
Pesaro were added at the opening of the sixteenth century, the domain
over which they ruled was a compact territory, some forty miles square,
between the Adriatic and the Apennines. From the close of the
thirteenth century they bore the title of Counts of Urbino. The famous
Conte Guido, whom Dante placed among the fraudulent in hell,
supported the honours of the house and increased its power by his
political action, at this epoch. But it was not until the year 1443 that the
Montefeltri acquired their ducal title. This was conferred by Eugenius
IV. upon Oddantonio, over whose alleged crimes and indubitable
assassination a veil of mystery still hangs. He was the son of Count
Guidantonio, and at his death the Montefeltri of Urbino were extinct in
the legitimate line. A natural son of Guidantonio had been, however,
recognised in his father's lifetime, and married to Gentile, heiress of
Mercatello. This was Federigo, a youth of great promise, who
succeeded his half-brother in 1444 as Count of Urbino. It was not until
1474 that the ducal title was revived for him.
Duke Frederick was a prince remarkable among Italian despots for
private virtues and sober use of his hereditary power. He spent his
youth at Mantua, in that famous school of Vittorino da Feltre, where
the sons and daughters of the first Italian nobility received a model
education in humanities, good manners, and gentle physical
accomplishments. More than any of his fellow-students Frederick
profited by this rare scholar's discipline. On leaving school he adopted
the profession of arms, as it was then practised, and joined the troop of
the Condottiere Niccolò Piccinino. Young men of his own rank,
especially the younger sons and bastards of ruling families, sought
military service under captains of adventure. If they succeeded they
were sure to make money. The coffers of the Church and the republics
lay open to their not too scrupulous hands; the wealth of Milan and
Naples was squandered on them in retaining-fees and salaries for active
service. There was always the further possibility of placing a coronet
upon their brows before they died, if haply they should wrest a town
from their employers, or obtain the cession of a province from a needy
Pope. The neighbours of the Montefeltri in Umbria, Romagna, and the
Marches of Ancona were all of them Condottieri. Malatestas of Rimini
and Pesaro, Vitelli of Città di Castello, Varani of Camerino, Baglioni of
Perugia, to mention only a few of the most eminent nobles, enrolled
themselves under the banners of plebeian adventurers like Piccinino
and Sforza Attendolo. Though their family connections gave them a
certain advantage, the system was essentially democratic. Gattamelata
and Carmagnola sprang from obscurity by personal address and
courage to the command of armies. Colleoni fought his way up from
the grooms to princely station and the bâton of S. Mark. Francesco
Sforza, whose father had begun life as a tiller of the soil, seized the
ducal crown of Milan, and founded a house which ranked among the
first in Europe.
It is not needful to follow Duke Frederick in his military career. We
may briefly remark that when he succeeded to Urbino by his brother's
death in 1444, he undertook generalship on a grand scale. His own
dominions supplied him with some of the best troops in Italy. He was
careful to secure the goodwill of his subjects by attending personally to
their interests, relieving them of imposts, and executing equal justice.
He gained the then unique reputation of an honest prince, paternally
disposed toward his dependents. Men flocked to his standards willingly,
and he was able to bring an important contingent into any army. These
advantages secured for him alliances with Francesco Sforza, and
brought him successively into connection with Milan, Venice, Florence,
the Church of Naples. As a tactician in the field he held high rank
among the generals of the age, and so considerable were his
engagements that he acquired great wealth in the exercise of his
profession. We find him at one time receiving 8000 ducats a month as
war-pay from Naples, with a peace pension of 6000. While
Captain-General of the League, he drew for his own use in war 45,000
ducats of annual pay. Retaining-fees and pensions in the name of past
services swelled his income, the exact extent of which has not, so far as
I am aware, been estimated, but which must have made him one of the
richest of Italian princes. All this wealth he spent upon his duchy,
fortifying and beautifying its cities, drawing youths of promise to his
court, maintaining a great train of life, and keeping his vassals in
good-humour by the lightness of a rule which contrasted favourably
with the exactions of needier despots.
While fighting for the masters who offered him condotta in the
complicated wars of Italy, Duke Frederick used his arms, when
occasion served, in his own quarrels. Many years of his life were spent
in a prolonged struggle with his neighbour Sigismondo Pandolfo
Malatesta, the bizarre and brilliant tyrant of Rimini, who committed the
fatal error of embroiling himself beyond all hope of pardon with the
Church, and who died discomfited in the duel with his warier
antagonist. Urbino profited by each mistake of Sigismondo, and the
history of this long desultory strife with Rimini is a history of gradual
aggrandisement and consolidation for the Montefeltrian duchy.
In 1459 Duke Frederick married his second wife, Battista, daughter of
Alessandro Sforza, Lord of Pesaro. Their portraits, painted by Piero
della Francesca, are to be seen in the Uffizzi at Florence. Some years
earlier, Frederick lost his right eye and had the bridge of his nose
broken in a jousting match outside the town-gate of Urbino. After this
accident, he preferred to be represented in profile--the profile so well
known to students of Italian art on medals and basreliefs. It was not
without medical aid and vows fulfilled by a mother's self-sacrifice to
death, if we may trust the diarists of Urbino, that the ducal couple got
an heir. In 1472, however, a son was born to them, whom they
christened Guido Paolo Ubaldo. He proved a youth of excellent parts
and noble nature--apt at study, perfect in all chivalrous
accomplishments. But he inherited some fatal physical debility, and his
life was marred with a constitutional disease, which then received the
name of gout, and which deprived him of the free use of his limbs.
After his father's death in 1482, Naples, Florence, and Milan continued
Frederick's war engagements to Guidobaldo. The prince was but a boy
of ten. Therefore these important condotte must be regarded as
compliments and pledges for the future. They prove to what a pitch
Duke Frederick had raised the credit of his state and war establishment.
Seven years later, Guidobaldo married Elisabetta, daughter of
Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua. This union, though a happy
one, was never blessed with children; and in the certainty of barrenness,
the young Duke thought it prudent to adopt a nephew as heir to his
dominions. He had several sisters, one of whom, Giovanna, had been
married to a nephew of Sixtus IV., Giovanni della Rovere, Lord of
Sinigaglia and Prefect of Rome. They had a son, Francesco Maria, who,
after his adoption by Guidobaldo, spent his boyhood at Urbino.
The last years of the fifteenth century were marked by the sudden rise
of Cesare Borgia to a power which threatened the liberties of Italy.
Acting as General for the Church, he carried his arms against the petty
tyrants of Romagna, whom he dispossessed and extirpated. His next
move was upon Camerino and Urbino. He first acquired Camerino,
having lulled Guidobaldo into false security by treacherous professions
of goodwill. Suddenly the Duke received intelligence that the Borgia
was marching on him over Cagli. This was in the middle of June 1502.
It is difficult to comprehend the state of weakness in which Guidobaldo
was surprised, or the panic which then seized him. He made no efforts
to rouse his subjects to resistance, but fled by night with his nephew
through rough mountain roads, leaving his capital and palace to the
marauder. Cesare Borgia took possession without striking a blow, and
removed the treasures of Urbino to the Vatican. His occupation of the
duchy was not undisturbed, however; for the people rose in several
places against him, proving that Guidobaldo had yielded too hastily to
alarm. By this time the fugitive was safe in Mantua, whence he
returned, and for a short time succeeded in establishing himself again at
Urbino. But he could not hold his own against the Borgias, and in
December, by a treaty, he resigned his claims and retired to Venice,
where he lived upon the bounty of S. Mark. It must be said, in justice to
the Duke, that his constitutional debility rendered him unfit for active
operations in the field. Perhaps he could not have done better than thus
to bend beneath the storm.
The sudden death of Alexander VI. and the election of a Della Rovere
to the Papacy in 1503 changed Guidobaldo's prospects. Julius II. was
the sworn foe of the Borgias and the close kinsman of Urbino's heir. It
was therefore easy for the Duke to walk into his empty palace on the
hill, and to reinstate himself in the domains from which he had so
recently been ousted. The rest of his life was spent in the retirement of
his court, surrounded with the finest scholars and the noblest gentlemen
of Italy. The ill-health which debarred him from the active pleasures
and employments of his station, was borne with uniform sweetness of
temper and philosophy.
When he died, in 1508, his nephew, Francesco Maria della Rovere,
succeeded to the duchy, and once more made the palace of Urbino the
resort of men-at-arms and captains. He was a prince of very violent
temper: of its extravagance history has recorded three remarkable
examples. He murdered the Cardinal of Pavia with his own hand in the
streets of Ravenna; stabbed a lover of his sister to death at Urbino; and
in a council of war knocked Francesco Guicciardini down with a blow
of his fist. When the history of Italy came to be written, Guicciardini
was probably mindful of that insult, for he painted Francesco Maria's
character and conduct in dark colours. At the same time this Duke of
Urbino passed for one of the first generals of the age. The greatest stain
upon his memory is his behaviour in the year 1527, when, by dilatory
conduct of the campaign in Lombardy, he suffered the passage of
Frundsberg's army unopposed, and afterwards hesitated to relieve
Rome from the horrors of the sack. He was the last Italian Condottiere
of the antique type; and the vices which Machiavelli exposed in that
bad system of mercenary warfare were illustrated on these occasions.
During his lifetime, the conditions of Italy were so changed by Charles
V.'s imperial settlement in 1530, that the occupation of Condottiere
ceased to have any meaning. Strozzi and Farnesi, who afterwards
followed this profession, enlisted in the ranks of France or Spain, and
won their laurels in Northern Europe.
While Leo X. held the Papal chair, the duchy of Urbino was for a while
wrested from the house of Della Rovere, and conferred upon Lorenzo
de' Medici. Francesco Maria made a better fight for his heritage than
Guidobaldo had done. Yet he could not successfully resist the power of
Rome. The Pope was ready to spend enormous sums of money on this
petty war; the Duke's purse was shorter, and the mercenary troops he
was obliged to use, proved worthless in the field. Spaniards, for the
most part, pitted against Spaniards, they suffered the campaigns to
degenerate into a guerilla warfare of pillage and reprisals. In 1517 the
duchy was formally ceded to Lorenzo. But this Medici did not live long
to enjoy it, and his only child Catherine, the future Queen of France,
never exercised the rights which had devolved upon her by inheritance.
The shifting scene of Italy beheld Francesco Maria reinstated in Urbino
after Leo's death in 1522.
This Duke married Leonora Gonzaga, a princess of the House of
Mantua. Their portraits, painted by Titian, adorn the Venetian room of
the Uffizzi. Of their son, Guidobaldo II., little need be said. He was
twice married, first to Giulia Varano, Duchess by inheritance of
Camerino; secondly, to Vittoria Farnese, daughter of the Duke of
Parma. Guidobaldo spent a lifetime in petty quarrels with his subjects,
whom he treated badly, attempting to draw from their pockets the
wealth which his father and the Montefeltri had won in military service.
He intervened at an awkward period of Italian politics. The old Italy of
despots, commonwealths, and Condottieri, in which his predecessors
played substantial parts, was at an end. The new Italy of Popes and
Austro-Spanish dynasties had hardly settled into shape. Between these
epochs, Guidobaldo II., of whom we have a dim and hazy presentation
on the page of history, seems somehow to have fallen flat. As a sign of
altered circumstances, he removed his court to Pesaro, and built the
great palace of the Della Roveres upon the public square.
Guidobaldaccio, as he was called, died in 1574, leaving an only son,
Francesco Maria II., whose life and character illustrate the new age
which had begun for Italy. He was educated in Spain at the court of
Philip II., where he spent more than two years. When he returned, his
Spanish haughtiness, punctilious attention to etiquette, and
superstitious piety attracted observation. The violent temper of the
Della Roveres, which Francesco Maria I. displayed in acts of homicide,
and which had helped to win his bad name for Guidobaldaccio, took
the form of sullenness in the last Duke. The finest episode in his life
was the part he played in the battle of Lepanto, under his old comrade,
Don John of Austria. His father forced him to an uncongenial marriage
with Lucrezia d'Este, Princess of Ferrara. She left him, and took refuge
in her native city, then honoured by the presence of Tasso and Guarini.
He bore her departure with philosophical composure, recording the
event in his diary as something to be dryly grateful for. Left alone, the
Duke abandoned himself to solitude, religious exercises, hunting, and
the economy of his impoverished dominions. He became that curious
creature, a man of narrow nature and mediocre capacity, who,
dedicated to the cult of self, is fain to pass for saint and sage in easy
circumstances. He married, for the second time, a lady, Livia della
Rovere, who belonged to his own family, but had been born in private
station. She brought him one son, the Prince Federigo-Ubaldo. This
youth might have sustained the ducal honours of Urbino, but for his
sage-saint father's want of wisdom. The boy was a spoiled child in
infancy. Inflated with Spanish vanity from the cradle, taught to regard
his subjects as dependents on a despot's will, abandoned to the caprices
of his own ungovernable temper, without substantial aid from the
paternal piety or stoicism, he rapidly became a most intolerable
princeling. His father married him, while yet a boy, to Claudia de'
Medici, and virtually abdicated in his favour. Left to his own devices,
Federigo chose companions from the troupes of players whom he drew
from Venice. He filled his palaces with harlots, and degraded himself
upon the stage in parts of mean buffoonery. The resources of the duchy
were racked to support these parasites. Spanish rules of etiquette and
ceremony were outraged by their orgies. His bride brought him one
daughter, Vittoria, who afterwards became the wife of Ferdinand,
Grand Duke of Tuscany. Then in the midst of his low dissipation and
offences against ducal dignity, he died of apoplexy at the early age of
eighteen--the victim, in the severe judgment of history, of his father's
selfishness and want of practical ability.
This happened in 1623. Francesco Maria was stunned by the blow. His
withdrawal from the duties of the sovereignty in favour of such a son
had proved a constitutional unfitness for the duties of his station. The
life he loved was one of seclusion in a round of pious exercises, petty
studies, peddling economies, and mechanical amusements. A powerful
and grasping Pope was on the throne of Rome. Urban at this juncture
pressed Francesco Maria hard; and in 1624 the last Duke of Urbino
devolved his lordships to the Holy See. He survived the formal act of
abdication seven years; when he died, the Pontiff added his duchy to
the Papal States, which thenceforth stretched from Naples to the
bounds of Venice on the Po.
III
Duke Frederick began the palace at Urbino in 1454, when he was still
only Count. The architect was Luziano of Lauranna, a Dalmatian; and
the beautiful white limestone, hard as marble, used in the construction,
was brought from the Dalmatian coast. This stone, like the Istrian stone
of Venetian buildings, takes and retains the chisel mark with wonderful
precision. It looks as though, when fresh, it must have had the pliancy
of clay, so delicately are the finest curves in scroll or foliage scooped
from its substance. And yet it preserves each cusp and angle of the
most elaborate pattern with the crispness and the sharpness of a crystal.
When wrought by a clever craftsman, its surface has neither the
waxiness of Parian, nor the brittle edge of Carrara marble; and it resists
weather better than marble of the choicest quality. This may be
observed in many monuments of Venice, where the stone has been long
exposed to sea-air. These qualities of the Dalmatian limestone, no less
than its agreeable creamy hue and smooth dull polish, adapt it to
decoration in low relief. The most attractive details in the palace at
Urbino are friezes carved of this material in choice designs of early
Renaissance dignity and grace. One chimney-piece in the Sala degli
Angeli deserves especial comment. A frieze of dancing Cupids, with
gilt hair and wings, their naked bodies left white on a ground of
ultramarine, is supported by broad flat pilasters. These are engraved
with children holding pots of flowers; roses on one side, carnations on
the other. Above the frieze another pair of angels, one at each end, hold
lighted torches; and the pyramidal cap of the chimney is carved with
two more, flying, and supporting the eagle of the Montefeltri on a
raised medallion. Throughout the palace we notice emblems
appropriate to the Houses of Montefeltro and Della Rovere: their arms,
three golden bends upon a field of azure: the Imperial eagle, granted
when Montefeltro was made a fief of the Empire: the Garter of England,
worn by the Dukes Federigo and Guidobaldo: the ermine of Naples: the
ventosa, or cupping-glass, adopted for a private badge by Frederick: the
golden oak-tree on an azure field of Della Rovere: the palm-tree, bent
beneath a block of stone, with its accompanying motto, Inclinata
Resurgam: the cipher, FE DX. Profile medallions of Federigo and
Guidobaldo, wrought in the lowest possible relief, adorn the staircases.
Round the great courtyard runs a frieze of military engines and ensigns,
trophies, machines, and implements of war, alluding to Duke
Frederick's profession of Condottiere. The doorways are enriched with
scrolls of heavy-headed flowers, acanthus foliage, honeysuckles,
ivy-berries, birds and boys and sphinxes, in all the riot of Renaissance
fancy.
This profusion of sculptured rilievo is nearly all that remains to show
how rich the palace was in things of beauty. Castiglione, writing in the
reign of Guidobaldo, says that 'in the opinion of many it is the fairest to
be found in Italy; and the Duke filled it so well with all things fitting its
magnificence, that it seemed less like a palace than a city. Not only did
he collect articles of common use, vessels of silver, and trappings for
chambers of rare cloths of gold and silk, and suchlike furniture, but he
added multitudes of bronze and marble statues, exquisite pictures, and
instruments of music of all sorts. There was nothing but was of the
finest and most excellent quality to be seen there. Moreover, he
gathered together at a vast cost a large number of the best and rarest
books in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, all of which he adorned with gold
and silver, esteeming them the chiefest treasure of his spacious palace.'
When Cesare Borgia entered Urbino as conqueror in 1502, he is said to
have carried off loot to the value of 150,000 ducats, or perhaps about a
quarter of a million sterling. Vespasiano, the Florentine bookseller, has
left us a minute account of the formation of the famous library of
manuscripts, which he valued at considerably over 30,000 ducats. Yet
wandering now through these deserted halls, we seek in vain for
furniture or tapestry or works of art. The books have been removed to
Rome. The pictures are gone, no man knows whither. The plate has
long been melted down. The instruments of music are broken. If
frescoes adorned the corridors, they have been whitewashed; the ladies'
chambers have been stripped of their rich arras. Only here and there we
find a raftered ceiling, painted in fading colours, which, taken with the
stonework of the chimney, and some fragments of inlaid panel-work on
door or window, enables us to reconstruct the former richness of these
princely rooms.
Exception must be made in favour of two apartments between the
towers upon the southern facade. These were apparently the private
rooms of the Duke and Duchess, and they are still approached by a
great winding staircase in one of the torricini. Adorned in
indestructible or irremovable materials, they retain some traces of their
ancient splendour. On the first floor, opening on the vaulted loggia, we
find a little chapel encrusted with lovely work in stucco and marble;
friezes of bulls, sphinxes, sea-horses, and foliage; with a low relief of
Madonna and Child in the manner of Mino da Fiesole. Close by is a
small study with inscriptions to the Muses and Apollo. The cabinet
connecting these two cells has a Latin legend, to say that Religion here
dwells near the temple of the liberal arts:
Bina vides parvo discrimine juncta sacella, Altera pars Musis altera
sacra Deo est.
On the floor above, corresponding in position to this apartment, is a
second, of even greater interest, since it was arranged by the Duke
Frederick for his own retreat. The study is panelled in tarsia of beautiful
design and execution. Three of the larger compartments show Faith,
Hope, and Charity; figures not unworthy of a Botticelli or a Filippino
Lippi. The occupations of the Duke are represented on a smaller scale
by armour, bâtons of command, scientific instruments, lutes, viols, and
books, some open and some shut. The Bible, Homer, Virgil, Seneca,
Tacitus, and Cicero, are lettered; apparently to indicate his favourite
authors. The Duke himself, arrayed in his state robes, occupies a fourth
great panel; and the whole of this elaborate composition is harmonised
by emblems, badges, and occasional devices of birds, articles of
furniture, and so forth. The tarsia, or inlaid wood of different kinds and
colours, is among the best in this kind of art to be found in Italy, though
perhaps it hardly deserves to rank with the celebrated choir-stalls of
Bergamo and Monte Oliveto. Hard by is a chapel, adorned, like the
lower one, with excellent reliefs. The loggia to which these rooms have
access looks across the Apennines, and down on what was once a
private garden. It is now enclosed and paved for the exercise of
prisoners who are confined in one part of the desecrated palace!
A portion of the pile is devoted to more worthy purposes; for the
Academy of Raphael here holds its sittings, and preserves a collection
of curiosities and books illustrative of the great painter's life and works.
They have recently placed in a tiny oratory, scooped by Guidobaldo II.
from the thickness of the wall, a cast of Raphael's skull, which will be
studied with interest and veneration. It has the fineness of modelling
combined with shapeliness of form and smallness of scale which is said
to have characterised Mozart and Shelley.
The impression left upon the mind after traversing this palace in its
length and breadth is one of weariness and disappointment. How shall
we reconstruct the long-past life which filled its rooms with sound, the
splendour of its pageants, the thrill of tragedies enacted here? It is not
difficult to crowd its doors and vacant spaces with liveried servants,
slim pages in tight hose, whose well-combed hair escapes from tiny
caps upon their silken shoulders. We may even replace the tapestries of
Troy which hung one hall, and build again the sideboards with their
embossed gilded plate. But are these chambers really those where
Emilia Pia held debate on love with Bembo and Castiglione; where
Bibbiena's witticisms and Fra Serafino's pranks raised smiles on courtly
lips; where Bernardo Accolti, 'the Unique,' declaimed his verses to
applauding crowds? Is it possible that into yonder hall, where now the
lion of S. Mark looks down alone on staring desolation, strode the
Borgia in all his panoply of war, a gilded glittering dragon, and from
the dais tore the Montefeltri's throne, and from the arras stripped their
ensigns, replacing these with his own Bull and Valentinus Dux? Here
Tasso tuned his lyre for Francesco Maria's wedding-feast, and read
'Aminta' to Lucrezia d'Este. Here Guidobaldo listened to the jests and
whispered scandals of the Aretine. Here Titian set his easel up to paint;
here the boy Raphael, cap in hand, took signed and sealed credentials
from his Duchess to the Gonfalonier of Florence. Somewhere in these
huge chambers, the courtiers sat before a torch-lit stage, when
Bibbiena's 'Calandria' and Caetiglione's 'Tirsi,' with their miracles of
masques and mummers, whiled the night away. Somewhere, we know
not where, Giuliano de' Medici made love in these bare rooms to that
mysterious mother of ill-fated Cardinal Ippolito; somewhere, in some
darker nook, the bastard Alessandro sprang to his strange-fortuned life
of tyranny and license, which Brutus-Lorenzino cut short with a
traitor's poignard-thrust in Via Larga. How many men, illustrious for
arts and letters, memorable by their virtues or their crimes, have trod
these silent corridors, from the great Pope Julius down to James III.,
self-titled King of England, who tarried here with Clementina Sobieski
through some twelve months of his ex-royal exile! The memories of all
this folk, flown guests and masters of the still-abiding palace-chambers,
haunt us as we hurry through. They are but filmy shadows. We cannot
grasp them, localise them, people surrounding emptiness with more
than withering cobweb forms.
Death takes a stronger hold on us than bygone life. Therefore, returning
to the vast Throne-room, we animate it with one scene it witnessed on
an April night in 1508. Duke Guidobaldo had died at Fossombrone,
repeating to his friends around his bed these lines of Virgil:
Me circum limus niger et deformis arundo Cocyti tardaque palus
inamabilis unda Alligat, et novies Styx interfusa coercet.
His body had been carried on the shoulders of servants through those
mountain ways at night, amid the lamentations of gathering multitudes
and the baying of dogs from hill-set farms alarmed by flaring
flambeaux. Now it is laid in state in the great hall. The dais and the
throne are draped in black. The arms and bâtons of his father hang
about the doorways. His own ensigns are displayed in groups and
trophies, with the banners of S. Mark, the Montefeltrian eagle, and the
cross keys of S. Peter. The hall itself is vacant, save for the high-reared
catafalque of sable velvet and gold damask, surrounded with wax
candles burning steadily. Round it passes a ceaseless stream of people,
coming and going, gazing at their Duke. He is attired in crimson hose
and doublet of black damask. Black velvet slippers are on his feet, and
his ducal cap is of black velvet. The mantle of the Garter, made of
dark-blue Alexandrine velvet, hooded with crimson, lined with white
silk damask, and embroidered with the badge, drapes the stiff sleeping
form.
It is easier to conjure up the past of this great palace, strolling round it
in free air and twilight; perhaps because the landscape and the life still
moving on the city streets bring its exterior into harmony with real
existence. The southern façade, with its vaulted balconies and flanking
towers, takes the fancy, fascinates the eye, and lends itself as a fit stage
for puppets of the musing mind. Once more imagination plants trim
orange-trees in giant jars of Gubbio ware upon the pavement where the
garden of the Duchess lay--the pavement paced in these bad days by
convicts in grey canvas jackets--that pavement where Monsignor
Bombo courted 'dear dead women' with Platonic phrase, smothering the
Menta of his natural man in lettuce culled from Academe and thyme of
Mount Hymettus. In yonder loggia, lifted above the garden and the
court, two lovers are in earnest converse. They lean beneath the
coffered arch, against the marble of the balustrade, he fingering his
dagger under the dark velvet doublet, she playing with a clove
carnation, deep as her own shame. The man is Giannandrea,
broad-shouldered bravo of Verona, Duke Guidobaldo's favourite and
carpet-count. The lady is Madonna Maria, daughter of Rome's Prefect,
widow of Venanzio Varano, whom the Borgia strangled. On their
discourse a tale will hang of woman's frailty and man's
boldness--Camerino's Duchess yielding to a low-born suitor's stalwart
charms. And more will follow, when that lady's brother, furious
Francesco Maria della Rovere, shall stab the bravo in torch-litten palace
rooms with twenty poignard strokes 'twixt waist and throat, and their
Pandarus shall be sent down to his account by a varlet's coltellata
through the midriff. Imagination shifts the scene, and shows in that
same loggia Rome's warlike Pope, attended by his cardinals and all
Urbino's chivalry. The snowy beard of Julius flows down upon his
breast, where jewels clasp the crimson mantle, as in Raphael's picture.
His eyes are bright with wine; for he has come to gaze on sunset from
the banquet-chamber, and to watch the line of lamps which soon will
leap along that palace cornice in his honour. Behind him lies Bologna
humbled. The Pope returns, a conqueror, to Rome. Yet once again
imagination is at work. A gaunt, bald man, close-habited in Spanish
black, his spare, fine features carved in purest ivory, leans from that
balcony. Gazing with hollow eyes, he tracks the swallows in their flight,
and notes that winter is at hand. This is the last Duke of Urbino,
Francesco Maria II., he whose young wife deserted him, who made for
himself alone a hermit-pedant's round of petty cares and niggard
avarice and mean-brained superstition. He drew a second consort from
the convent, and raised up seed unto his line by forethought, but beheld
his princeling fade untimely in the bloom of boyhood. Nothing is left
but solitude. To the mortmain of the Church reverts Urbino's lordship,
and even now he meditates the terms of devolution. Jesuits cluster in
the rooms behind, with comfort for the ducal soul and calculations for
the interests of Holy See.
A farewell to these memories of Urbino's dukedom should be taken in
the crypt of the cathedral, where Francesco Maria II., the last Duke,
buried his only son and all his temporal hopes. The place is scarcely
solemn. Its dreary barocco emblems mar the dignity of death. A bulky
Pietà by Gian Bologna, with Madonna's face unfinished, towers up and
crowds the narrow cell. Religion has evanished from this late
Renaissance art, nor has the afterglow of Guido Reni's hectic piety yet
overflushed it. Chilled by the stifling humid sense of an extinct race
here entombed in its last representative, we gladly emerge from the
sepulchral vault into the air of day.
Filippo Visconti, with a smile on his handsome face, is waiting for us at
the inn. His horses, sleek, well fed, and rested, toss their heads
impatiently. We take our seats in the carriage, open wide beneath a
sparkling sky, whirl past the palace and its ghost-like recollections, and
are halfway on the road to Fossombrone in a cloud of dust and whirr of
wheels before we think of looking back to greet Urbino. There is just
time. The last decisive turning lies in front. We stand bareheaded to
salute the grey mass of buildings ridged along the sky. Then the open
road invites us with its varied scenery and movement. From the
shadowy past we drive into the world of human things, for ever
changefully unchanged, unrestfully the same. This interchange between
dead memories and present life is the delight of travel.
*****
VITTORIA ACCORAMBONI
AND THE TRAGEDY OF WEBSTER
I
During the pontificate of Gregory XIII. (1572-85), Papal authority in
Rome reached its lowest point of weakness, and the ancient splendour
of the Papal court was well-nigh eclipsed. Art and learning had died out.
The traditions of the days of Leo, Julius, and Paul III. were forgotten. It
seemed as though the genius of the Renaissance had migrated across
the Alps. All the powers of the Papacy were directed to the suppression
of heresies and to the re-establishment of spiritual supremacy over the
intellect of Europe. Meanwhile society in Rome returned to mediæval
barbarism. The veneer of classical refinement and humanistic urbanity,
which for a time had hidden the natural savagery of the Roman nobles,
wore away. The Holy City became a den of bandits; the territory of the
Church supplied a battle-ground for senseless party strife, which the
weak old man who wore the triple crown was quite unable to control. It
is related how a robber chieftain, Marianazzo, refused the offer of a
general pardon from the Pope, alleging that the profession of brigand
was far more lucrative, and offered greater security of life, than any
trade within the walls of Rome. The Campagna, the ruined citadels
about the basements of the Sabine and Ciminian hills, the quarters of
the aristocracy within the city, swarmed with bravos, who were
protected by great nobles and fed by decent citizens for the advantages
to be derived from the assistance of abandoned and courageous ruffians.
Life, indeed, had become impossible without fixed compact with the
powers of lawlessness. There was hardly a family in Rome which did
not number some notorious criminal among the outlaws. Murder,
sacrilege, the love of adventure, thirst for plunder, poverty, hostility to
the ascendant faction of the moment, were common causes of voluntary
or involuntary outlawry; nor did public opinion regard a bandit's calling
as other than honourable.
It may readily be imagined that in such a state of society the grisliest
tragedies were common enough in Rome. The history of some of these
has been preserved to us in documents digested from public trials and
personal observation by contemporary writers. That of the Cenci, in
which a notorious act of parricide furnished the plot of a popular
novella, is well known. And such a tragedy, even more rife in
characteristic incidents, and more distinguished by the quality of its
dramatis personæ, is that of Vittoria Accoramboni.
Vittoria was born in 1557, of a noble but impoverished family, at
Gubbio, among the hills of Umbria. Her biographers are rapturous in
their praises of her beauty, grace, and exceeding charm of manner. Not
only was her person most lovely, but her mind shone at first with all the
amiable lustre of a modest, innocent, and winning youth. Her father,
Claudio Accoramboni, removed to Rome, where his numerous children
were brought up under the care of their mother, Tarquinia, an ambitious
and unscrupulous woman, bent on rehabilitating the decayed honours
of their house. Here Vittoria in early girlhood soon became the fashion.
She exercised an irresistible influence over all who saw her, and many
were the offers of marriage she refused. At length a suitor appeared
whose condition and connection with the Roman ecclesiastical nobility
rendered him acceptable in the eyes of the Accoramboni. Francesco
Peretti was welcomed as the successful candidate for Vittoria's hand.
His mother, Camilla, was sister to Felice, Cardinal of Montalto; and her
son, Francesco Mignucci, had changed his surname in compliment to
this illustrious relative. The Peretti were of humble origin. The cardinal
himself had tended swine in his native village; but, supported by an
invincible belief in his own destinies, and gifted with a powerful
intellect and determined character, he passed through all grades of the
Franciscan Order to its generalship, received the bishoprics of Fermo
and S. Agata, and lastly, in the year 1570, assumed the scarlet with the
title of Cardinal Montalto. He was now upon the high way to the
Papacy, amassing money by incessant care, studying the humours of
surrounding factions, effacing his own personality, and by mixing but
little in the intrigues of the court, winning the reputation of a prudent,
inoffensive old man. These were his tactics for securing the Papal
throne; nor were his expectations frustrated; for in 1585 he was chosen
Pope, the parties of the Medici and the Farnesi agreeing to accept him
as a compromise. When Sixtus V. was once firmly seated on S. Peter's
chair, he showed himself in his true colours. An implacable
administrator of severest justice, a rigorous economist, an iconoclastic
foe to paganism, the first act of his reign was to declare a war of
extirpation against the bandits who had reduced Rome in his
predecessor's rule to anarchy.
It was the nephew, then, of this man, whom historians have judged the
greatest personage of his own times, that Vittoria Accoramboni married
on the 28th of June 1573. For a short while the young couple lived
happily together. According to some accounts of their married life, the
bride secured the favour of her powerful uncle-in-law, who indulged
her costly fancies to the full. It is, however, more probable that the
Cardinal Montalto treated her follies with a grudging parsimony; for we
soon find the Peretti household hopelessly involved in debt. Discord,
too, arose between Vittoria and her husband on the score of a certain
levity in her behaviour; and it was rumoured that even during the brief
space of their union she had proved a faithless wife. Yet she contrived
to keep Francesco's confidence, and it is certain that her family profited
by their connection with the Peretti. Of her six brothers, Mario, the
eldest, was a favourite courtier of the great Cardinal d'Este. Ottavio was
in orders, and through Montalto's influence obtained the See of
Fossombrone. The same eminent protector placed Scipione in the
service of the Cardinal Sforza. Camillo, famous for his beauty and his
courage, followed the fortunes of Filibert of Savoy, and died in France.
Flaminio was still a boy, dependent, as the sequel of this story shows,
upon his sister's destiny. Of Marcello, the second in age and most
important in the action of this tragedy, it is needful to speak with more
particularity. He was young, and, like the rest of his breed, singularly
handsome--so handsome, indeed, that he is said to have gained an
infamous ascendency over the great Duke of Bracciano, whose privy
chamberlain he had become. Marcello was an outlaw for the murder of
Matteo Pallavicino, the brother of the Cardinal of that name. This did
not, however, prevent the chief of the Orsini house from making him
his favourite and confidential friend. Marcello, who seems to have
realised in actual life the worst vices of those Roman courtiers
described for us by Aretino, very soon conceived the plan of exalting
his own fortunes by trading on his sister's beauty. He worked upon the
Duke of Bracciano's mind so cleverly, that he brought this haughty
prince to the point of an insane passion for Peretti's young wife; and
meanwhile so contrived to inflame the ambition of Vittoria and her
mother, Tarquinia, that both were prepared to dare the worst of crimes
in expectation of a dukedom. The game was a difficult one to play. Not
only had Francesco Peretti first to be murdered, but the inequality of
birth and wealth and station between Vittoria and the Duke of
Bracciano rendered a marriage almost impossible. It was also an affair
of delicacy to stimulate without satisfying the Duke's passion. Yet
Marcello did not despair. The stakes were high enough to justify great
risks; and all he put in peril was his sister's honour, the fame of the
Accoramboni, and the favour of Montalto. Vittoria, for her part, trusted
in her power to ensnare and secure the noble prey both had in view.
Paolo Giordano Orsini, born about the year 1537, was reigning Duke of
Bracciano. Among Italian princes he ranked at least upon a par with the
Dukes of Urbino, and his family, by its alliances, was more illustrious
than any of that time in Italy. He was a man of gigantic stature,
prodigious corpulence, and marked personal daring; agreeable in
manners, but subject to uncontrollable fits of passion, and incapable of
self-restraint when crossed in any whim or fancy. Upon the habit of his
body it is needful to insist, in order that the part he played in this
tragedy of intrigue, crime, and passion may be well defined. He found
it difficult to procure a charger equal to his weight, and he was so fat
that a special dispensation relieved him from the duty of genuflexion in
the Papal presence. Though lord of a large territory, yielding princely
revenues, he laboured under heavy debts; for no great noble of the
period lived more splendidly, with less regard for his finances. In the
politics of that age and country, Paolo Giordano leaned toward France.
Yet he was a grandee of Spain, and had played a distinguished part in
the battle of Lepanto. Now the Duke of Bracciano was a widower. He
had been married in 1553 to Isabella de' Medici, daughter of the Grand
Duke Cosimo, sister of Francesco, Bianca Capello's lover, and of the
Cardinal Ferdinando. Suspicion of adultery with Troilo Orsini had
fallen on Isabella, and her husband, with the full concurrence of her
brothers, removed her in 1576 from this world.[7] No one thought the
worse of Bracciano for this murder of his wife. In those days of
abandoned vice and intricate villany, certain points of honour were
maintained with scrupulous fidelity. A wife's adultery was enough to
justify the most savage and licentious husband in an act of
semi-judicial vengeance; and the shame she brought upon his head was
shared by the members of her own house, so that they stood by,
consenting to her death. Isabella, it may be said, left one son, Virginio,
who became in due time Duke of Bracciano.
It appears that in the year 1581, four years after Vittoria's marriage, the
Duke of Bracciano had satisfied Marcello of his intention to make her
his wife, and of his willingness to countenance Francesco Peretti's
murder. Marcello, feeling sure of his game, introduced the Duke in
private to his sister, and induced her to overcome any natural
repugnance she may have felt for the unwieldy and gross lover. Having
reached this point, it was imperative to push matters quickly on toward
matrimony.
But how should the unfortunate Francesco be entrapped? They caught
him in a snare of peculiar atrocity, by working on the kindly feelings
which his love for Vittoria had caused him to extend to all the
Acooramboni. Marcello, the outlaw, was her favourite brother, and
Marcello at that time lay in hiding, under the suspicion of more than
ordinary crime, beyond the walls of Rome. Late in the evening of the
18th of April, while the Peretti family were retiring to bed, a messenger
from Marcello arrived, entreating Francesco to repair at once to Monte
Cavallo. Marcello had affairs of the utmost importance to communicate,
and begged his brother-in-law not to fail him at a grievous pinch. The
letter containing this request was borne by one Dominico d'Aquaviva,
alias Il Mancino, a confederate of Vittoria's waiting-maid. This fellow,
like Marcello, was an outlaw; but when he ventured into Rome he
frequented Peretti's house, and had made himself familiar with its
master as a trusty bravo. Neither in the message, therefore, nor in the
messenger was there much to rouse suspicion. The time, indeed, was
oddly chosen, and Marcello had never made a similar appeal on any
previous occasion. Yet his necessities might surely have obliged him to
demand some more than ordinary favour from a brother. Francesco
immediately made himself ready to set out, armed only with his sword
and attended by a single servant. It was in vain that his wife and his
mother reminded him of the dangers of the night, the loneliness of
Monte Cavallo, its ruinous palaces and robber-haunted caves. He was
resolved to undertake the adventure, and went forth, never to return. As
he ascended the hill, he fell to earth, shot with three harquebuses. His
body was afterwards found on Monte Cavallo, stabbed through and
through, without a trace that could identify the murderers. Only, in the
course of subsequent investigations, Il Mancino (on the 24th of
February 1582) made the following statements:--That Vittoria's mother,
assisted by the waiting woman, had planned the trap; that Marchionne
of Gubbio and Paolo Barca of Bracciano, two of the Duke's men, had
despatched the victim. Marcello himself, it seems, had come from
Bracciano to conduct the whole affair. Suspicion fell immediately upon
Vittoria and her kindred, together with the Duke of Bracciano; nor was
this diminished when the Accoramboni, fearing the pursuit of justice,
took refuge in a villa of the Duke's at Magnanapoli a few days after the
murder.
A cardinal's nephew, even in those troublous times, was not killed
without some noise being made about the matter. Accordingly Pope
Gregory XIII. began to take measures for discovering the authors of the
crime. Strange to say, however, the Cardinal Montalto, notwithstanding
the great love he was known to bear his nephew, begged that the
investigation might be dropped. The coolness with which he first
received the news of Francesco Peretti's death, the dissimulation with
which he met the Pope's expression of sympathy in a full consistory,
his reserve in greeting friends on ceremonial visits of condolence, and,
more than all, the self-restraint he showed in the presence of the Duke
of Bracciano, impressed the society of Rome with the belief that he was
of a singularly moderate and patient temper. It was thought that the
man who could so tamely submit to his nephew's murder, and suspend
the arm of justice when already raised for vengeance, must prove a
mild and indulgent ruler. When, therefore, in the fifth year after this
event, Montalto was elected Pope, men ascribed his elevation in no
small measure to his conduct at the present crisis. Some, indeed,
attributed his extraordinary moderation and self-control to the right
cause. 'Veramente costui è un gran frate!' was Gregory's remark at the
close of the consistory when Montalto begged him to let the matter of
Peretti's murder rest. 'Of a truth, that fellow is a consummate
hypocrite!' How accurate this judgment was, appeared when Sixtus V.
assumed the reins of power. The same man who, as monk and cardinal,
had smiled on Bracciano, though he knew him to be his nephew's
assassin, now, as Pontiff and sovereign, bade the chief of the Orsini
purge his palace and dominions of the scoundrels he was wont to
harbour, adding significantly, that if Felice Peretti forgave what had
been done against him in a private station, he would exact uttermost
vengeance for disobedience to the will of Sixtus. The Duke of
Bracciano judged it best, after that warning, to withdraw from Rome.
Francesco Peretti had been murdered on the 16th of April 1581. Sixtus
V. was proclaimed on the 24th of April 1585. In this interval Vittoria
underwent a series of extraordinary perils and adventures. First of all,
she had been secretly married to the Duke in his gardens of
Magnanapoli at the end of April 1581. That is to say, Marcello and she
secured their prize, as well as they were able, the moment after
Francesco had been removed by murder. But no sooner had the
marriage become known, than the Pope, moved by the scandal it
created, no less than by the urgent instance of the Orsini and Medici,
declared it void. After some while spent in vain resistance, Bracciano
submitted, and sent Vittoria back to her father's house. By an order
issued under Gregory's own hand, she was next removed to the prison
of Corte Savella, thence to the monastery of S. Cecilia in Trastevere,
and finally to the Castle of S. Angelo. Here, at the end of December
1581, she was put on trial for the murder of her first husband. In prison
she seems to have borne herself bravely, arraying her beautiful person
in delicate attire, entertaining visitors, exacting from her friends the
honours due to a duchess, and sustaining the frequent examinations to
which she was submitted with a bold, proud front. In the middle of the
month of July her constancy was sorely tried by the receipt of a letter in
the Duke's own handwriting, formally renouncing his marriage. It was
only by a lucky accident that she was prevented on this occasion from
committing suicide. The Papal court meanwhile kept urging her either
to retire to a monastery or to accept another husband. She firmly
refused to embrace the religious life, and declared that she was already
lawfully united to a living husband, the Duke of Bracciano. It seemed
impossible to deal with her; and at last, on the 8th of November, she
was released from prison under the condition of retirement to Gubbio.
The Duke had lulled his enemies to rest by the pretence of yielding to
their wishes. But Marcello was continually beside him at Bracciano,
where we read of a mysterious Greek enchantress whom he hired to
brew love-philters for the furtherance of his ambitious plots. Whether
Bracciano was stimulated by the brother's arguments or by the witch's
potions need not be too curiously questioned. But it seems in any case
certain that absence inflamed his passion instead of cooling it.
Accordingly, in September 1583, under the excuse of a pilgrimage to
Loreto, he contrived to meet Vittoria at Trevi, whence he carried her in
triumph to Bracciano. Here he openly acknowledged her as his wife,
installing her with all the splendour due to a sovereign duchess. On the
10th of October following, he once more performed the marriage
ceremony in the principal church of his fief; and in the January of 1584
he brought her openly to Rome. This act of contumacy to the Pope,
both as feudal superior and as supreme Pontiff, roused all the former
opposition to his marriage. Once more it was declared invalid. Once
more the Duke pretended to give way. But at this juncture Gregory died;
and while the conclave was sitting for the election of the new Pope, he
resolved to take the law into his own hands, and to ratify his union with
Vittoria by a third and public marriage in Rome. On the morning of the
24th of April 1585, their nuptials were accordingly once more
solemnised in the Orsini palace. Just one hour after the ceremony, as
appears from the marriage register, the news arrived of Cardinal
Montalto's election to the Papacy, Vittoria lost no time in paying her
respects to Camilla, sister of the new Pope, her former mother-in-law.
The Duke visited Sixtus V. in state to compliment him on his elevation.
But the reception which both received proved that Rome was no safe
place for them to live in. They consequently made up their minds for
flight.
A chronic illness from which Bracciano had lately suffered furnished a
sufficient pretext. This seems to have been something of the nature of a
cancerous ulcer, which had to be treated by the application of raw meat
to open sores. Such details are only excusable in the present narrative
on the ground that Bracciano's disease considerably affects our moral
judgment of the woman who could marry a man thus physically tainted,
and with her husband's blood upon his hands. At any rate, the Duke's
lupa justified his trying what change of air, together with the sulphur
waters of Abano, would do for him.
The Duke and Duchess arrived in safety at Venice, where they had
engaged the Dandolo palace on the Zuecca. There they only stayed a
few days, removing to Padua, where they had hired palaces of the
Foscari in the Arena and a house called De' Cavalli. At Salò, also, on
the Lake of Garda, they provided themselves with fit dwellings for their
princely state and their large retinues, intending to divide their time
between the pleasures which the capital of luxury afforded and the
simpler enjoyments of the most beautiful of the Italian lakes. But la
gioia dei profani è un fumo passaggier. Paolo Giordano Orsini, Duke
of Bracciano, died suddenly at Salò on the 10th of November 1585,
leaving the young and beautiful Vittoria helpless among enemies. What
was the cause of his death? It is not possible to give a clear and certain
answer. We have seen that he suffered from a horrible and voracious
disease, which after his removal from Rome seems to have made
progress. Yet though this malady may well have cut his life short,
suspicion of poison was not, in the circumstances, quite unreasonable.
The Grand Duke of Tuscany, the Pope, and the Orsini family were all
interested in his death. Anyhow, he had time to make a will in Vittoria's
favour, leaving her large sums of money, jewels, goods, and
houses--enough, in fact, to support her ducal dignity with splendour.
His hereditary fiefs and honours passed by right to his only son,
Virginio.
Vittoria, accompanied by her brother, Marcello, and the whole court of
Bracciano, repaired at once to Padua, where she was soon after joined
by Flaminio, and by the Prince Lodovico Orsini. Lodovico Orsini
assumed the duty of settling Vittoria's affairs under her dead husband's
will. In life he had been the Duke's ally as well as relative. His family
pride was deeply wounded by what seemed to him an ignoble, as it was
certainly an unequal, marriage. He now showed himself the relentless
enemy of the Duchess. Disputes arose between them as to certain
details, which seem to have been legally decided in the widow's favour.
On the night of the 22nd of December, however, forty men disguised in
black and fantastically tricked out to elude detection, surrounded her
palace. Through the long galleries and chambers hung with arras, eight
of them went, bearing torches, in search of Vittoria and her brothers.
Marcello escaped, having fled the house under suspicion of the murder
of one of his own followers. Flaminio, the innocent and young, was
playing on his lute and singing Miserere in the great hall of the palace.
The murderers surprised him with a shot from one of their harquebuses.
He ran, wounded in the shoulder, to his sister's room. She, it is said,
was telling her beads before retiring for the night. When three of the
assassins entered, she knelt before the crucifix, and there they stabbed
her in the left breast, turning the poignard in the wound, and asking her
with savage insults if her heart was pierced. Her last words were, 'Jesus,
I pardon you.' Then they turned to Flaminio, and left him pierced with
seventy-four stiletto wounds.
The authorities of Padua identified the bodies of Vittoria and Flaminio,
and sent at once for further instructions to Venice. Meanwhile it
appears that both corpses were laid out in one open coffin for the
people to contemplate. The palace and the church of the Eremitani, to
which they had been removed, were crowded all through the following
day with a vast concourse of the Paduans. Vittoria's wonderful dead
body, pale yet sweet to look upon, the golden hair flowing around her
marble shoulders, the red wound in her breast uncovered, the stately
limbs arrayed in satin as she died, maddened the populace with its
surpassing loveliness. 'Dentibus fremebant,' says the chronicler, when
they beheld that gracious lady stiff in death. And of a truth, if her
corpse was actually exposed in the chapel of the Eremitani, as we have
some right to assume, the spectacle must have been impressive. Those
grim gaunt frescoes of Mantegna looked down on her as she lay
stretched upon her bier, solemn and calm, and, but for pallor, beautiful
as though in life. No wonder that the folk forgot her first husband's
murder, her less than comely marriage to the second. It was enough for
them that this flower of surpassing loveliness had been cropped by
villains in its bloom. Gathering in knots around the torches placed
beside the corpse, they vowed vengeance against the Orsini; for
suspicion, not unnaturally, fell on Prince Lodovico.
The Prince was arrested and interrogated before the court of Padua. He
entered their hall attended by forty armed men, responded haughtily to
their questions, and demanded free passage for his courier to Virginio
Orsini, then at Florence. To this demand the court acceded; but the
precaution of way-laying the courier and searching his person was very
wisely taken. Besides some formal dispatches which announced
Vittoria's assassination, they found in this man's boot a compromising
letter, declaring Virginio a party to the crime, and asserting that
Lodovico had with his own poignard killed their victim. Padua placed
itself in a state of defence, and prepared to besiege the palace of Prince
Lodovico, who also got himself in readiness for battle. Engines,
culverins, and firebrands were directed against the barricades which he
had raised. The militia was called out and the Brenta was strongly
guarded. Meanwhile the Senate of S. Mark had dispatched the
Avogadore, Aloisio Bragadin, with full power to the scene of action.
Lodovico Orsini, it may be mentioned, was in their service; and had not
this affair intervened, he would in a few weeks have entered on his
duties as Governor for Venice of Corfu.
The bombardment of Orsini's palace began on Christmas Day. Three of
the Prince's men were killed in the first assault; and since the artillery
brought to bear upon him threatened speedy ruin to the house and its
inhabitants, he made up his mind to surrender. 'The Prince Luigi,'
writes one-chronicler of these events, 'walked attired in brown, his
poignard at his side, and his cloak slung elegantly under his arm. The
weapon being taken from him, he leaned upon a balustrade, and began
to trim his nails with a little pair of scissors he happened to find there.'
On the 27th he was strangled in prison by order of the Venetian
Republic. His body was carried to be buried, according to his own will,
in the church of S. Maria dell' Orto at Venice. Two of his followers
were hung next day. Fifteen were executed on the following Monday;
two of these were quartered alive; one of them, the Conte Paganello,
who confessed to having slain Vittoria, had his left side probed with his
own cruel dagger. Eight were condemned to the galleys, six to prison,
and eleven were acquitted. Thus ended this terrible affair, which
brought, it is said, good credit and renown to the lords of Venice
through all nations of the civilised world. It only remains to be added
that Marcello Accoramboni was surrendered to the Pope's vengeance
and beheaded at Ancona, where also his mysterious accomplice, the
Greek sorceress, perished.
II
This story of Vittoria Accoramboni's life and tragic ending is drawn, in
its main details, from a narrative published by Henri Beyle in his
'Chroniques et Novelles.'[8] He professes to have translated it literally
from a manuscript communicated to him by a nobleman of Mantua;
and there are strong internal evidences of the truth of this assertion.
Such compositions are frequent in Italian libraries, nor is it rare for one
of them to pass into the common market--as Mr. Browning's famous
purchase of the tale on which he based his 'Ring and the Book'
sufficiently proves. These pamphlets were produced, in the first
instance, to gratify the curiosity of the educated public in an age which
had no newspapers, and also to preserve the memory of famous trials.
How far the strict truth was represented, or whether, as in the case of
Beatrice Cenci, the pathetic aspect of the tragedy was unduly dwelt on,
depended, of course, upon the mental bias of the scribe, upon his
opportunities of obtaining exact information, and upon the taste of the
audience for whom he wrote. Therefore, in treating such documents as
historical data, we must be upon our guard. Professor Gnoli, who has
recently investigated the whole of Vittoria's eventful story by the light
of contemporary documents, informs us that several narratives exist in
manuscript, all dealing more or less accurately with the details of the
tragedy. One of these was published in Italian at Brescia in 1586. A
Frenchman, De Rosset, printed the same story in its main outlines at
Lyons in 1621. Our own dramatist, John Webster, made it the subject
of a tragedy, which he gave to the press in 1612. What were his sources
of information we do not know for certain. But it is clear that he was
well acquainted with the history. He has changed some of the names
and redistributed some of the chief parts. Vittoria's first husband, for
example, becomes Camillo; her mother, named Cornelia instead of
Tarquinia, is so far from abetting Peretti's murder and countenancing
her daughter's shame, that she acts the rôle of a domestic Cassandra.
Flaminio and not Marcello is made the main instrument of Vittoria's
crime and elevation. The Cardinal Montalto is called Monticelso, and
his papal title is Paul IV. instead of Sixtus V. These are details of
comparative indifference, in which a playwright may fairly use his
liberty of art. On the other hand, Webster shows a curious knowledge
of the picturesque circumstances of the tale. The garden in which
Vittoria meets Bracciano is the villa of Magnanapoli; Zanche, the
Moorish slave, combines Vittoria's waiting-woman, Caterina, and the
Greek sorceress who so mysteriously dogged Marcello's footsteps to
the death. The suspicion of Bracciano's murder is used to introduce a
quaint episode of Italian poisoning.
Webster exercised the dramatist's privilege of connecting various
threads of action in one plot, disregarding chronology, and hazarding
an ethical solution of motives which mere fidelity to fact hardly
warrants. He shows us Vittoria married to Camillo, a low-born and
witless fool, whose only merit consists in being nephew to the Cardinal
Monticelso, afterwards Pope Paul IV.[9] Paulo Giordano Ursini, Duke
of Brachiano, loves Vittoria, and she suggests to him that, for the
furtherance of their amours, his wife, the Duchess Isabella, sister to
Francesco de' Medici, Grand Duke of Florence, should be murdered at
the same time as her own husband, Camillo. Brachiano is struck by this
plan, and with the help of Vittoria's brother, Flamineo, he puts it at
once into execution. Flamineo hires a doctor who poisons Brachiano's
portrait, so that Isabella dies after kissing it. He also with his own
hands twists Camillo's neck during a vaulting-match, making it appear
that he came by his death accidentally. Suspicion of the murder
attaches, however, to Vittoria. She is tried for her life before
Monticelso and De' Medici; acquitted, and relegated to a house of
Convertites or female reformatory. Brachiano, on the accession of
Monticelso to the Papal throne, resolves to leave Rome with Vittoria.
They escape, together with her mother Cornelia, and her brothers
Flamineo and Marcello, to Padua; and it is here that the last scenes of
the tragedy are laid.
The use Webster made of Lodovico Orsini deserves particular attention.
He introduces this personage in the very first scene as a spendthrift,
who, having run through his fortune, has been outlawed. Count
Lodovico, as he is always called, has no relationship with the Orsini,
but is attached to the service of Francesco de' Medici, and is an old
lover of the Duchess Isabella. When, therefore, the Grand Duke
meditates vengeance on Brachiano, he finds a fitting instrument in the
desperate Lodovico. Together, in disguise, they repair to Padua.
Lodovico poisons the Duke of Brachiano's helmet, and has the
satisfaction of ending his last struggles by the halter. Afterwards, with
companions, habited as a masquer, he enters Vittoria's palace and puts
her to death together with her brother Flamineo. Just when the deed of
vengeance has been completed, young Giovanni Orsini, heir of
Brachiano, enters and orders the summary execution of Lodovico for
this deed of violence. Webster's invention in this plot is confined to the
fantastic incidents attending on the deaths of Isabella, Camillo, and
Brachiano, and to the murder of Marcello by his brother Flamineo, with
the further consequence of Cornelia's madness and death. He has
heightened our interest in Isabella, at the expense of Brachiano's
character, by making her an innocent and loving wife instead of an
adulteress. He has ascribed different motives from the real ones to
Lodovico in order to bring this personage into rank with the chief
actors, though this has been achieved with only moderate success.
Vittoria is abandoned to the darkest interpretation. She is a woman who
rises to eminence by crime, as an unfaithful wife, the murderess of her
husband, and an impudent defier of justice. Her brother, Flamineo,
becomes under Webster's treatment one of those worst human
infamies--a court dependent; ruffian, buffoon, pimp, murderer by turns.
Furthermore, and without any adequate object beyond that of
completing this study of a type he loved, Webster makes him murder
his own brother Marcello by treason. The part assigned to Marcello, it
should be said, is a genial and happy one; and Cornelia, the mother of
the Accoramboni, is a dignified character, pathetic in her suffering.
Webster, it may be added, treats the Cardinal Monticelso as allied in
some special way to the Medici. Yet certain traits in his character,
especially his avoidance of bloodshed and the tameness of his temper
after Camillo has been murdered, seem to have been studied from the
historical Sixtus.
III
The character of the 'White Devil, or Vittoria Corombona,' is perhaps
the most masterly creation of Webster's genius. Though her history is a
true one in its leading incidents, the poet, while portraying a real
personage, has conceived an original individuality. It is impossible to
know for certain how far the actual Vittoria was guilty of her first
husband's murder. Her personality fails to detach itself from the
romance of her biography by any salient qualities. But Webster, with
true playwright's instinct, casts aside historical doubts, and delineates in
his heroine a woman of a very marked and terrible nature. Hard as
adamant, uncompromising, ruthless, Vittoria follows ambition as the
loadstar of her life. It is the ambition to reign as Duchess, far more than
any passion for a paramour, which makes her plot Camillo's and
Isabella's murders, and throws her before marriage into Brachiano's
arms. Added to this ambition, she is possessed with the cold demon of
her own imperial and victorious beauty. She has the courage of her
criminality in the fullest sense; and much of the fascination with which
Webster has invested her, depends upon her dreadful daring. Her
portrait is drawn with full and firm touches. Although she appears but
five times on the scene, she fills it from the first line of the drama to the
last. Each appearance adds effectively to the total impression. We see
her first during a criminal interview with Brachiano, contrived by her
brother Flamineo. The plot of the tragedy is developed in this scene;
Vittoria suggesting, under the metaphor of a dream, that her lover
should compass the deaths of his duchess and her husband. The dream
is told with deadly energy and ghastly picturesqueness. The cruel sneer
at its conclusion, murmured by a voluptuous woman in the ears of an
impassioned paramour, chills us with the sense of concentrated vice.
Her next appearance is before the court, on trial for her husband's
murder. The scene is celebrated, and has been much disputed by critics.
Relying on her own dauntlessness, on her beauty, and on the protection
of Brachiano, Vittoria hardly takes the trouble to plead innocence or to
rebut charges. She stands defiant, arrogant, vigilant, on guard; flinging
the lie in the teeth of her arraigners; quick to seize the slightest sign of
feebleness in their attack; protesting her guiltlessness so loudly that she
shouts truth down by brazen strength of lung; retiring at the close with
taunts; blazing throughout with the intolerable lustre of some baleful
planet. When she enters for the third time, it is to quarrel with her
paramour. He has been stung to jealousy by a feigned love-letter. She
knows that she has given him no cause; it is her game to lure him by
fidelity to marriage. Therefore she resolves to make his mistake the
instrument of her exaltation. Beginning with torrents of abuse, hurling
reproaches at him for her own dishonour and the murder of his wife,
working herself by studied degrees into a tempest of ungovernable rage,
she flings herself upon the bed, refuses his caresses, spurns and
tramples on him, till she has brought Brachiano, terrified, humbled,
fascinated, to her feet. Then she gradually relents beneath his
passionate protestations and repeated promises of marriage. At this
point she speaks but little. We only feel her melting humour in the air,
and long to see the scene played by such an actress as Madame
Bernhardt. When Vittoria next appears, it is as Duchess by the deathbed
of the Duke, her husband. Her attendance here is necessary, but it
contributes little to the development of her character. We have learned
to know her, and expect neither womanish tears nor signs of affection
at a crisis which touches her heart less than her self-love. Webster,
among his other excellent qualities, knew how to support character by
reticence. Vittoria's silence in this act is significant; and when she
retires exclaiming, 'O me! this place is hell!' we know that it is the
outcry, not of a woman who has lost what made life dear, but of one
who sees the fruits of crime imperilled by a fatal accident. The last
scene of the play is devoted to Vittoria. It begins with a notable
altercation between her and Flamineo. She calls him 'ruffian' and
'villain,' refusing him the reward of his vile service. This quarrel
emerges in one of Webster's grotesque contrivances to prolong a
poignant situation. Flamineo quits the stage and reappears with pistols.
He affects a kind of madness; and after threatening Vittoria, who never
flinches, he proposes they should end their lives by suicide. She
humours him, but manages to get the first shot. Flamineo falls,
wounded apparently to death. Then Vittoria turns and tramples on him
with her feet and tongue, taunting him in his death agony with the
enumeration of his crimes. Her malice and her energy are equally
infernal. Soon, however, it appears that the whole device was but a
trick of Flamineo's to test his sister. The pistol was not loaded. He now
produces a pair which are properly charged, and proceeds in good
earnest to the assassination of Vittoria. But at this critical moment
Lodovico and his masquers appear; brother and sister both die
unrepentant, defiant to the end. Vittoria's customary pride and her
familiar sneers impress her speech in these last moments with a
trenchant truth to nature:
You my death's-man! Methinks thou dost not look horrid enough, Thou
hast too good a face to be a hangman: If thou be, do thy office in right
form; Fall down upon thy knees, and ask forgiveness!
*****
I will be waited on in death; my servant Shall never go before me.
*****
Yes, I shall welcome death As princes do some great ambassadors: I'll
meet thy weapon half-way.
*****
'Twas a manly blow! The next thou giv'st, murder some sucking infant;
And then thou wilt be famous.
So firmly has Webster wrought the character of this white devil, that
we seem to see her before us as in a picture. 'Beautiful as the leprosy,
dazzling as the lightning,' to use a phrase of her enthusiastic admirer
Hazlitt, she takes her station like a lady in some portrait by Paris
Bordone, with gleaming golden hair twisted into snakelike braids about
her temples, with skin white as cream, bright cheeks, dark dauntless
eyes, and on her bosom, where it has been chafed by jewelled chains, a
flush of rose. She is luxurious, but not so abandoned to the pleasures of
the sense as to forget the purpose of her will and brain. Crime and peril
add zest to her enjoyment. When arraigned in open court before the
judgment-seat of deadly and unscrupulous foes, she conceals the
consciousness of guilt, and stands erect, with fierce front, unabashed,
relying on the splendour of her irresistible beauty and the subtlety of
her piercing wit. Chafing with rage, the blood mounts and adds a lustre
to her cheek. It is no flush of modesty, but of rebellious indignation.
The Cardinal, who hates her, brands her emotion with the name of
shame. She rebukes him, hurling a jibe at his own mother. And when
they point with spiteful eagerness to the jewels blazing on her breast, to
the silks and satins that she rustles in, her husband lying murdered, she
retorts:
Had I foreknown his death, as you suggest, I would have bespoke my
mourning.
She is condemned, but not vanquished, and leaves the court with a
stinging sarcasm. They send her to a house of Convertites:
V.C. A house of Convertites! what's that?
M. A house of penitent whores.
V.C. Do the noblemen of Rome Erect it for their wives, that I am sent
To lodge there?
Charles Lamb was certainly in error? when he described Vittoria's
attitude as one of 'innocence-resembling boldness.' In the trial scene, no
less than in the scenes of altercation with Brachiano and Flamineo,
Webster clearly intended her to pass for a magnificent vixen, a
beautiful and queenly termagant. Her boldness is the audacity of
impudence, which does not condescend to entertain the thought of guilt.
Her egotism is so hard and so profound that the very victims whom she
sacrifices to ambition seem in her sight justly punished. Of Camillo and
Isabella, her husband and his wife, she says to Brachiano:
And both were struck dead by that sacred yew, In that base shallow
grave that was their due.
IV
It is tempting to pass from this analysis of Vittoria's life to a
consideration of Webster's drama as a whole, especially in a book
dedicated to Italian byways. For that mysterious man of genius had
explored the dark and devious paths of Renaissance vice, and had
penetrated the secrets of Italian wickedness with truly appalling
lucidity. His tragedies, though worthless as historical documents, have
singular value as commentaries upon history, as revelations to us of the
spirit of the sixteenth century in its deepest gloom.
Webster's plays, owing to the condensation of their thought and the
compression of their style, are not easy to read for the first time. He
crowds so many fantastic incidents into one action, and burdens his
discourse with so much profoundly studied matter, that we rise from
the perusal of his works with a blurred impression of the fables, a deep
sense of the poet's power and personality, and an ineffaceable
recollection of one or two resplendent scenes. His Roman history-play
of 'Appius and Virginia' proves that he understood the value of a simple
plot, and that he was able, when he chose, to work one out with
conscientious calmness. But the two Italian dramas upon which his
fame is justly founded, by right of which he stands alone among the
playwrights of all literatures, are marked by a peculiar and wayward
mannerism. Each part is etched with equal effort after luminous effect
upon a back-ground of lurid darkness; and the whole play is made up of
these parts, without due concentration on a master-motive. The
characters are definite in outline, but, taken together in the conduct of a
single plot, they seem to stand apart, like figures in a tableau vivant;
nor do they act and react each upon the other in the play of
interpenetrative passions. That this mannerism was deliberately chosen,
we have a right to believe. 'Willingly, and not ignorantly, in this kind
have I faulted,' is the answer Webster gives to such as may object that
he has not constructed his plays upon the classic model. He seems to
have had a certain sombre richness of tone and intricacy of design in
view, combining sensational effect and sententious pregnancy of
diction in works of laboured art, which, when adequately represented to
the ear and eye upon the stage, might at a touch obtain the animation
they now lack for chamber-students.
When familiarity has brought us acquainted with his style, when we
have disentangled the main characters and circumstances from their
adjuncts, we perceive that he treats poignant and tremendous situations
with a concentrated vigour special to his genius; that he has studied
each word and trait of character, and that he has prepared by gradual
approaches and degrees of horror for the culmination of his tragedies.
The sentences which seem at first sight copied from a commonplace
book, are found to be appropriate. Brief lightning flashes of acute
perception illuminate the midnight darkness of his all but unimaginably
depraved characters. Sharp unexpected touches evoke humanity in the
fantoccini of his wayward art. No dramatist has shown more
consummate ability in heightening terrific effects, in laying bare the
innermost mysteries of crime, remorse, and pain, combined to make
men miserable. It has been said of Webster that, feeling himself
deficient in the first poetic qualities, he concentrated his powers upon
one point, and achieved success by sheer force of self-cultivation.
There is perhaps some truth in this. At any rate, his genius was of a
narrow and peculiar order, and he knew well how to make the most of
its limitations. Yet we must not forget that he felt a natural bias toward
the dreadful stuff with which he deals. The mystery of iniquity had an
irresistible attraction for his mind. He was drawn to comprehend and
reproduce abnormal elements of spiritual anguish. The materials with
which he builds his tragedies are sought for in the ruined places of lost
souls, in the agonies of madness and despair, in the sarcasms of
criminal and reckless atheism, in slow tortures, griefs beyond
endurance, the tempests of remorseful death, the spasms of fratricidal
bloodshed. He is often melodramatic in the means employed to bring
these psychological conditions home to us. He makes too free use of
poisoned engines, daggers, pistols, disguised murderers, and so forth.
Yet his firm grasp upon the essential qualities of diseased and guilty
human nature saves him, even at his wildest, from the unrealities and
extravagances into which less potent artists of the drame
sanglant--Marston, for example--blundered.
With Webster, the tendency to brood on horrors was no result of
calculation. It belonged to his idiosyncrasy. He seems to have been
suckled from birth at the breast of that Mater Tenebrarum, our Lady of
Darkness, whom De Quincey in one of his 'Suspiria de Profundis'
describes among the Semnai Theai, the august goddesses, the
mysterious foster-nurses of suffering humanity. He cannot say the
simplest thing without giving it a ghastly or sinister turn. If one of his
characters draws a metaphor from pie-crust, he must needs use
language of the churchyard:
You speak as if a man Should know what fowl is coffined in a baked
meat Afore you cut it open.
Hideous similes are heaped together in illustration of the commonest
circumstances:
Places at court are but like beds in the hospital, where this man's head
lies at that man's foot, and so lower and lower.
When knaves come to preferment, they rise as gallowses are raised in
the Low Countries, one upon another's shoulders.
I would sooner eat a dead pigeon taken from the soles of the feet of one
sick of the plague than kiss one of you fasting.
A soldier is twitted with serving his master:
As witches do their serviceable spirits, Even with thy prodigal blood.
An adulterous couple get this curse:
Like mistletoe on sear elms spent by weather, Let him cleave to her,
and both rot together.
A bravo is asked:
Dost thou imagine thou canst slide on blood, And not be tainted with a
shameful fall? Or, like the black and melancholic yew-tree, Dost think
to root thyself in dead men's graves, And yet to prosper?
It is dangerous to extract philosophy of life from any dramatist. Yet
Webster so often returns to dark and doleful meditations, that we may
fairly class him among constitutional pessimists. Men, according to the
grimness of his melancholy, are:
Only like dead walls or vaulted graves, That, ruined, yield no echo. O
this gloomy world! In what a shadow or deep pit of darkness Doth
womanish and fearful mankind live!
*****
We are merely the stars' tennis-balls, struck and banded Which way
please them.
*****
Pleasure of life! what is't? only the good hours of an ague.
A Duchess is 'brought to mortification,' before her strangling by the
executioner, in this high fantastical oration:
Thou art a box of worm-seed, at best but a salvatory of green mummy.
What's this flesh? A little crudded milk, fantastical puff-paste, &c. &c.
Man's life in its totality is summed up with monastic cynicism in these
lyric verses:
Of what is't fools make such vain keeping? Sin their conception, their
birth weeping, Their life a general mist of error, Their death a hideous
storm of terror.
The greatness of the world passes by with all its glory:
Vain the ambition of kings, Who seek by trophies and dead things To
leave a living name behind, And weave but nets to catch the wind.
It would be easy to surfeit criticism with similar examples; where
Webster is writing in sarcastic, meditative, or deliberately
terror-stirring moods. The same dark dye of his imagination shows
itself even more significantly in circumstances where, in the work of
any other artist, it would inevitably mar the harmony of the picture. A
lady, to select one instance, encourages her lover to embrace her at the
moment of his happiness. She cries:
Sir, be confident! What is't distracts you? This is flesh and blood, sir;
'Tis not the figure cut in alabaster, Kneels at my husband's tomb.
Yet so sustained is Webster's symphony of sombre tints, that we do not
feel this sepulchral language, this 'talk fit for a charnel' (to use one of
his own phrases), to be out of keeping. It sounds like a presentiment of
coming woes, which, as the drama grows to its conclusion, gather and
darken on the wretched victims of his bloody plot.
It was with profound sagacity, or led by some deep-rooted instinct, that
Webster sought the fables of his two great tragedies, 'The White Devil'
and 'The Duchess of Malfi,' in Italian annals. Whether he had visited
Italy in his youth, we cannot say; for next to nothing is known about
Webster's life. But that he had gazed long and earnestly into the mirror
held up by that enchantress of the nations in his age, is certain. Aghast
and fascinated by the sins he saw there flaunting in the light of
day--sins on whose pernicious glamour Ascham, Greene, and Howell
have insisted with impressive vehemence--Webster discerned in them
the stuff he needed for philosophy and art. Withdrawing from that
contemplation, he was like a spirit 'loosed out of hell to speak of
horrors.' Deeper than any poet of the time, deeper than any even of the
Italians, he read the riddle of the sphinx of crime. He found there
something akin to his own imaginative mood, something which he
alone could fully comprehend and interpret. From the superficial
narratives of writers like Bandello he extracted a spiritual essence
which was, if not the literal, at least the ideal, truth involved in them.
The enormous and unnatural vices, the domestic crimes of cruelty,
adultery, and bloodshed, the political scheming and the subtle arts of
vengeance, the ecclesiastical tyranny and craft, the cynical scepticism
and lustre of luxurious godlessness, which made Italy in the midst of
her refinement blaze like 'a bright and ominous star' before the nations;
these were the very elements in which the genius of
Webster--salamander-like in flame--could live and flourish. Only the
incidents of Italian history, or of French history in its Italianated epoch,
were capable of supplying him with the proper type of plot. It was in
Italy alone, or in an Italianated country, such as England for a brief
space in the reign of the first Stuart threatened to become, that the
well-nigh diabolical wickedness of his characters might have been
realised. An audience familiar with Italian novels through Belleforest
and Painter, inflamed by the long struggle of the Reformation against
the scarlet abominations of the Papal See, outraged in their moral sense
by the political paradoxes of Machiavelli, horror-stricken at the still
recent misdoings of Borgias and Medici and Farnesi, alarmed by that
Italian policy which had conceived the massacre of S. Bartholomew in
France, and infuriated by that ecclesiastical hypocrisy which triumphed
in the same; such an audience were at the right point of sympathy with
a poet who undertook to lay the springs of Southern villany before
them bare in a dramatic action. But, as the old proverb puts it, 'Inglese
Italianato è un diavolo incarnato.' 'An Englishman assuming the Italian
habit is a devil in the flesh.' The Italians were depraved, but spiritually
feeble. The English playwright, when he brought them on the stage,
arrayed with intellectual power and gleaming with the lurid splendour
of a Northern fancy, made them tenfold darker and more terrible. To
the subtlety and vices of the South he added the melancholy, meditation,
and sinister insanity of his own climate. He deepened the complexion
of crime and intensified lawlessness by robbing the Italian character of
levity. Sin, in his conception of that character, was complicated with
the sense of sin, as it never had been in a Florentine or a Neapolitan. He
had not grasped the meaning of the Machiavellian conscience, in its
cold serenity and disengagement from the dread of moral consequence.
Not only are his villains stealthy, frigid, quick to evil, merciless, and
void of honour; but they brood upon their crimes and analyse their
motives. In the midst of their audacity they are dogged by dread of
coming retribution. At the crisis of their destiny they look back upon
their better days with intellectual remorse. In the execution of their
bloodiest schemes they groan beneath the chains of guilt they wear, and
quake before the phantoms of their haunted brains.
Thus passion and reflection, superstition and profanity, deliberate
atrocity and fear of judgment, are united in the same nature; and to
make the complex still more strange, the play-wright has gifted these
tremendous personalities with his own wild humour and imaginative
irony. The result is almost monstrous, such an ideal of character as
makes earth hell. And yet it is not without justification. To the Italian
text has been added the Teutonic commentary, and both are fused by a
dramatic genius into one living whole.
One of these men is Flamineo, the brother of Vittoria Corombona, upon
whose part the action of the 'White Devil' depends. He has been bred in
arts and letters at the university of Padua; but being poor and of
luxurious appetites, he chooses the path of crime in courts for his
advancement. A duke adopts him for his minion, and Flamineo acts the
pander to this great man's lust. He contrives the death of his
brother-in-law, suborns a doctor to poison the Duke's wife, and
arranges secret meetings between his sister and the paramour who is to
make her fortune and his own. His mother appears like a warning Até
to prevent her daughter's crime. In his rage he cries:
What fury raised thee up? Away, away!
And when she pleads the honour of their house he answers:
Shall I, Having a path so open and so free To my preferment, still retain
your milk In my pale forehead?
Later on, when it is necessary to remove another victim, he runs his
own brother through the body and drives his mother to madness. Yet, in
the midst of these crimes, we are unable to regard him as a simple
cut-throat. His irony and reckless courting of damnation open-eyed to
get his gust of life in this world, make him no common villain. He can
be brave as well as fierce. When the Duke insults him he bandies taunt
for taunt:
Brach. No, you pander?
Flam. What, me, my lord? Am I your dog?
B. A bloodhound; do you brave, do you stand me?
F. Stand you! let those that have diseases run; I need no plasters.
B. Would you be kicked?
F. Would you have your neck broke? I tell you, duke, I am not in
Russia; My shins must be kept whole.
B. Do you know me?
F. Oh, my lord, methodically: As in this world there are degrees of
evils, So in this world there are degrees of devils. You're a great duke, I
your poor secretary.
When the Duke dies and his prey escapes him, the rage of
disappointment breaks into this fierce apostrophe:
I cannot conjure; but if prayers or oaths. Will get the speech of him,
though forty devils Wait on him in his livery of flames, I'll speak to
him and shake him by the hand, Though I be blasted.
As crimes thicken round him, and he still despairs of the reward for
which he sold himself, conscience awakes:
I have lived Riotously ill, like some that live in court, And sometimes
when my face was full of smiles Have felt the maze of conscience in
my breast.
The scholar's scepticism, which lies at the root of his perversity, finds
utterance in this meditation upon death:
Whither shall I go now? O Lucian, thy ridiculous purgatory! to find
Alexander the Great cobbling shoes, Pompey tagging points, and Julius
Cæsar making hair-buttons!
Whether I resolve to fire, earth, water, air, or all the elements by
scruples, I know not, nor greatly care.
At the last moment he yet can say:
We cease to grieve, cease to be Fortune's slaves, Nay, cease to die, by
dying.
And again, with the very yielding of his spirit:
My life was a black charnel.
It will be seen that in no sense does Flamineo resemble Iago. He is not
a traitor working by craft and calculating ability to well-considered
ends. He is the desperado frantically clutching at an uncertain and
impossible satisfaction. Webster conceives him as a self-abandoned
atheist, who, maddened by poverty and tainted by vicious living, takes
a fury to his heart, and, because the goodness of the world has been for
ever lost to him, recklessly seeks the bad.
Bosola, in the 'Duchess of Malfi,' is of the same stamp. He too has been
a scholar. He is sent to the galleys 'for a notorious murder,' and on his
release he enters the service of two brothers, the Duke of Calabria and
the Cardinal of Aragon, who place him as their intelligencer at the court
of their sister.
Bos. It seems you would create me One of your familiars.
Ferd. Familiar! what's that?
Bos. Why, a very quaint invisible devil in flesh, An intelligencer.
Ferd. Such a kind of thriving thing I would wish thee; and ere long
thou may'st arrive At a higher place by it.
Lured by hope of preferment, Bosola undertakes the office of spy,
tormentor, and at last of executioner. For:
Discontent and want Is the best clay to mould a villain of.
But his true self, though subdued to be what he quaintly styles 'the
devil's quilted anvil,' on which 'all sins are fashioned and the blows
never heard,' continually rebels against this destiny. Compared with
Flamineo, he is less unnaturally criminal. His melancholy is more
fantastic, his despair more noble. Throughout the course of craft and
cruelty on which he is goaded by a relentless taskmaster, his nature,
hardened as it is, revolts.
At the end, when Bosola presents the body of the murdered Duchess to
her brother, Webster has wrought a scene of tragic savagery that
surpasses almost any other that the English stage can show. The sight,
of his dead sister maddens Ferdinand, who, feeling the eclipse of reason
gradually absorb his faculties, turns round with frenzied hatred on the
accomplice of his fratricide. Bosola demands the price of guilt.
Ferdinand spurns him with the concentrated eloquence of despair and
the extravagance of approaching insanity. The murderer taunts his
master coldly and laconically, like a man whose life is wrecked, who
has waded through blood to his reward, and who at the last moment
discovers the sacrifice of his conscience and masculine freedom to be
fruitless. Remorse, frustrated hopes, and thirst for vengeance convert
Bosola from this hour forward into an instrument of retribution. The
Duke and his brother the Cardinal are both brought to bloody deaths by
the hand which they had used to assassinate their sister.
It is fitting that something should be said about Webster's conception of
the Italian despot. Brachiano and Ferdinand, the employers of Flamineo
and Bosola, are tyrants such as Savonarola described, and as we read of
in the chronicles of petty Southern cities. Nothing is suffered to stand
between their lust and its accomplishment. They override the law by
violence, or pervert its action to their own advantage:
The law to him Is like a foul black cobweb to a spider; He makes it his
dwelling and a prison To entangle those shall feed him.
They are eaten up with parasites, accomplices, and all the creatures of
their crimes:
He and his brother are like plum-trees that grow crooked over standing
pools; they are rich and over-laden with fruit, but none but crows, pies,
and caterpillars feed on them.
In their lives they are without a friend; for society in guilt brings
nought of comfort, and honours are but emptiness:
Glories, like glow-worms, afar off shine bright; But looked to near,
have neither heat nor light.
Their plots and counterplots drive repose far from them:
There's but three furies found in spacious hell; But in a great man's
breast three thousand dwell.
Fearful shapes afflict their fancy; shadows of ancestral crime or ghosts
of their own raising:
For these many years None of our family dies, but there is seen The
shape of an old woman; which is given By tradition to us to have been
murdered By her nephews for her riches.
Apparitions haunt them:
How tedious is a guilty conscience! When I look into the fish-ponds in
my garden, Methinks I see a thing armed with a rake That seems to
strike at me.
Continually scheming against the objects of their avarice and hatred,
preparing poisons or suborning bravoes, they know that these same arts
will be employed against them. The wine-cup hides arsenic; the
headpiece is smeared with antimony; there is a dagger behind every
arras, and each shadow is a murderer's. When death comes, they meet it
trembling. What irony Webster has condensed in Brachiano's outcry:
On pain of death, let no man name death to me; It is a word infinitely
horrible.
And how solemn are the following reflections on the death of princes:
O thou soft natural death, that art joint-twin To sweetest slumber! no
rough-bearded comet Stares on thy mild departure; the dull owl Beats
not against thy casement, the hoarse wolf Scents not thy carrion: pity
winds thy corse, Whilst horror waits on princes.
After their death, this is their epitaph:
These wretched eminent things Leave no more fame behind'em than
should one Fall in a frost and leave his print in snow.
Of Webster's despots, the finest in conception and the firmest in
execution is Ferdinand of Aragon. Jealousy of his sister and avarice
take possession of him and torment him like furies. The flash of
repentance over her strangled body is also the first flash of insanity. He
survives to present the spectacle of a crazed lunatic, and to be run
through the body by his paid assassin. In the Cardinal of Aragon,
Webster paints a profligate Churchman, no less voluptuous,
blood-guilty, and the rest of it, than his brother the Duke of Calabria. It
seems to have been the poet's purpose in each of his Italian tragedies to
unmask Rome as the Papal city really was. In the lawless desperado,
the intemperate tyrant, and the godless ecclesiastic, he portrayed the
three curses from which Italian society was actually suffering.
It has been needful to dwell upon the gloomy and fantastic side of
Webster's genius. But it must not be thought that he could touch no
finer chord. Indeed, it might be said that in the domain of pathos he is
even more powerful than in that of horror. His mastery in this region is
displayed in the creation of that dignified and beautiful woman, the
Duchess of Malfi, who, with nothing in her nature, had she but lived
prosperously, to divide her from the sisterhood of gentle ladies, walks,
shrined in love and purity and conscious rectitude, amid the snares and
pitfalls of her persecutors, to die at last the victim of a brother's fevered
avarice and a desperado's egotistical ambition. The apparatus of
infernal cruelty, the dead man's hand, the semblances of murdered sons
and husband, the masque of madmen, the dirge and doleful emblems of
the tomb with which she is environed in her prison by the torturers who
seek to goad her into lunacy, are insufficient to disturb the tranquillity
and tenderness of her nature. When the rope is being fastened to her
throat, she does not spend her breath in recriminations, but turns to the
waiting-woman and says:
Farewell, Cariola! I pray thee look thou givest my little boy Some
syrup for his cold, and let the girl Say her prayers ere she sleep.
In the preceding scenes we have had enough, nay, over-much, of
madness, despair, and wrestling with doom. This is the calm that comes
when death is present, when the tortured soul lays down its burden of
the flesh with gladness. But Webster has not spared another touch of
thrilling pathos.
The death-struggle is over; the fratricide has rushed away, a maddened
man; the murderer is gazing with remorse upon the beautiful dead body
of his lady, wishing he had the world wherewith to buy her back to life
again; when suddenly she murmurs 'Mercy!' Our interest, already
overstrained, revives with momentary hope. But the guardians of the
grave will not be exorcised; and 'Mercy!' is the last groan of the injured
Duchess.
Webster showed great skill in his delineation of the Duchess. He had to
paint a woman in a hazardous situation: a sovereign stooping in her
widowhood to wed a servant; a lady living with the mystery of this
unequal marriage round her like a veil. He dowered her with no salient
qualities of intellect or heart or will; but he sustained our sympathy
with her, and made us comprehend her. To the last she is a Duchess;
and when she has divested state and bowed her head to enter the low
gate of heaven--too low for coronets--her poet shows us, in the lines
already quoted, that the woman still survives.
The same pathos surrounds the melancholy portrait of Isabella in
'Vittoria Corombona.' But Isabella, in that play, serves chiefly to
enhance the tyranny of her triumphant rival. The main difficulty under
which these scenes of rarest pathos would labour, were they brought
upon the stage, is their simplicity in contrast with the ghastly and
contorted horrors that envelop them. A dialogue abounding in the
passages I have already quoted--a dialogue which bandies 'O you
screech-owl!' and 'Thou foul black cloud!'--in which a sister's
admonition to her brother to think twice of suicide assumes a form so
weird as this:
I prithee, yet remember, Millions are now in graves, which at last day
Like mandrakes shall rise shrieking.-such a dialogue could not be rendered save by actors strung up to a
pitch of almost frenzied tension. To do full justice to what in Webster's
style would be spasmodic were it not so weighty, and at the same time
to maintain the purity of outline and melodious rhythm of such
characters as Isabella, demands no common histrionic power.
In attempting to define Webster's touch upon Italian tragic story, I have
been led perforce to concentrate attention on what is painful and
shocking to our sense of harmony in art. He was a vigorous and
profoundly imaginative playwright. But his most enthusiastic admirers
will hardly contend that good taste or moderation determined the
movement of his genius. Nor, though his insight into the essential
dreadfulness of Italian tragedy was so deep, is it possible to maintain
that his portraiture of Italian life was true to its more superficial aspects.
What place would there be for a Correggio or a Raphael in such a
world as Webster's? Yet we know that the art of Raphael and Correggio
is in exact harmony with the Italian temperament of the same epoch
which gave birth to Cesare Borgia and Bianca Gapello. The
comparatively slighter sketch of Iachimo in 'Cymbeline' represents the
Italian as he felt and lived, better than the laboured portrait of Flamineo.
Webster's Italian tragedies are consequently true, not so much to the
actual conditions of Italy, as to the moral impression made by those
conditions on a Northern imagination.
*****
AUTUMN WANDERINGS
I.--ITALIAM PETIMUS
Italiam Petimus! We left our upland home before daybreak on a clear
October morning. There had been a hard frost, spangling the meadows
with rime-crystals, which twinkled where the sun's rays touched them.
Men and women were mowing the frozen grass with thin short Alpine
scythes; and as the swathes fell, they gave a crisp, an almost tinkling
sound. Down into the gorge, surnamed of Avalanche, our horses
plunged; and there we lost the sunshine till we reached the Bear's Walk,
opening upon the vales of Albula, and Julier, and Schyn. But up above,
shone morning light upon fresh snow, and steep torrent-cloven slopes
reddening with a hundred fading plants; now and then it caught the
grey-green icicles that hung from cliffs where summer streams had
dripped. There is no colour lovelier than the blue of an autumn sky in
the high Alps, defining ridges powdered with light snow, and melting
imperceptibly downward into the warm yellow of the larches and the
crimson of the bilberry. Wiesen was radiantly beautiful: those aërial
ranges of the hills that separate Albula from Julier soared crystal-clear
above their forests; and for a foreground, on the green fields starred
with lilac crocuses, careered a group of children on their sledges. Then
came the row of giant peaks--Pitz d'Aela, Tinzenhorn, and Michelhorn,
above the deep ravine of Albula--all seen across wide undulating
golden swards, close-shaven and awaiting winter. Carnations hung
from cottage windows in full bloom, casting sharp angular black
shadows on white walls.
Italiam petimus! We have climbed the valley of the Julier, following its
green, transparent torrent. A night has come and gone at Mühlen. The
stream still leads us up, diminishing in volume as we rise, up through
the fleecy mists that roll asunder for the sun, disclosing far-off snowy
ridges and blocks of granite mountains. The lifeless, soundless waste of
rock, where only thin winds whistle out of silence and fade suddenly
into still air, is passed. Then comes the descent, with its forests of larch
and cembra, golden and dark green upon a ground of grey, and in front
the serried shafts of the Bernina, and here and there a glimpse of
emerald lake at turnings of the road. Autumn is the season for this
landscape. Through the fading of innumerable leaflets, the yellowing of
larches, and something vaporous in the low sun, it gains a colour not
unlike that of the lands we seek. By the side of the lake at Silvaplana
the light was strong and warm, but mellow. Pearly clouds hung over the
Maloja, and floating overhead cast shadows on the opaque water,
which may literally be compared to chrysoprase. The breadth of golden,
brown, and russet tints upon the valley at this moment adds softness to
its lines of level strength. Devotees of the Engadine contend that it
possesses an austere charm beyond the common beauty of Swiss
landscape; but this charm is only perfected in autumn. The fresh snow
on the heights that guard it helps. And then there are the forests of dark
pines upon those many knolls and undulating mountain-flanks beside
the lakes. Sitting and dreaming there in noonday sun, I kept repeating
to myself Italiam petimus!
A hurricane blew upward from the pass as we left Silvaplana, ruffling
the lake with gusts of the Italian wind. By Silz Maria we came in sight
of a dozen Italian workmen, arm linked in arm in two rows, tramping in
rhythmic stride, and singing as they went. Two of them were such
nobly built young men, that for a moment the beauty of the landscape
faded from my sight, and I was saddened. They moved to their singing,
like some of Mason's or Frederick Walker's figures, with the free grace
of living statues, and laughed as we drove by. And yet, with all their
beauty, industry, sobriety, intelligence, these Italians of the northern
valleys serve the sterner people of the Grisons like negroes, doing their
roughest work at scanty wages.
So we came to the vast Alpine wall, and stood on a bare granite slab,
and looked over into Italy, as men might lean from the battlements of a
fortress. Behind lies the Alpine valley, grim, declining slowly
northward, with wind-lashed lakes and glaciers sprawling from
storm-broken pyramids of gneiss. Below spread the unfathomable
depths that lead to Lombardy, flooded with sunlight, filled with
swirling vapour, but never wholly hidden from our sight. For the blast
kept shifting the cloud-masses, and the sun streamed through in spears
and bands of sheeny rays. Over the parapet our horses dropped, down
through sable spruce and amber larch, down between tangles of rowan
and autumnal underwood. Ever as we sank, the mountains rose--those
sharp embattled precipices, toppling spires, impendent chasms blurred
with mist, that make the entrance into Italy sublime. Nowhere do the
Alps exhibit their full stature, their commanding puissance, with such
majesty as in the gates of Italy; and of all those gates I think there is
none to compare with Maloja, none certainly to rival it in abruptness of
initiation into the Italian secret. Below Vico Soprano we pass already
into the violets and blues of Titian's landscape. Then come the purple
boulders among chestnut trees; then the double dolomite-like peak of
Pitz Badin and Promontogno.
It is sad that words can do even less than painting could to bring this
window-scene at Promontogno before another eye. The casement just
frames it. In the foreground are meadow slopes, thinly, capriciously
planted with chestnut trees and walnuts, each standing with its shadow
cast upon the sward. A little farther falls the torrent, foaming down
between black jaws of rain-stained granite, with the wooden buildings
of a rustic mill set on a ledge of rock. Suddenly above this landscape
soars the valley, clothing its steep sides on either hand with pines; and
there are emerald isles of pasture on the wooded flanks; and then cliffs,
where the red-stemmed larches glow; and at the summit, shooting into
ether with a swathe of mist around their basement, soar the double
peaks, the one a pyramid, the other a bold broken crystal not unlike the
Finsteraarhorn seen from Furka. These are connected by a snowy
saddle, and snow is lying on their inaccessible crags in powdery drifts.
Sunlight pours between them into the ravine. The green and golden
forests now join from either side, and now recede, according as the
sinuous valley brings their lines together or disparts them. There is a
sound of cow-bells on the meadows; and the roar of the stream is
dulled or quickened as the gusts of this October wind sweep by or
slacken. Italiam petimus!
Tangimus Italiam! Chiavenna is a worthy key to this great gate Italian.
We walked at night in the open galleries of the cathedral cloister--white,
smoothly curving, well-proportioned loggie, enclosing a green space,
whence soars the campanile to the stars. The moon had sunk, but her
light still silvered the mountains that stand at watch round Chiavenna;
and the castle rock was flat and black against that dreamy background.
Jupiter, who walked so lately for us on the long ridge of the Jacobshorn
above our pines, had now an ample space of sky over Lombardy to
light his lamp in. Why is it, we asked each other, as we smoked our
pipes and strolled, my friend and I;--why is it that Italian beauty does
not leave the spirit so untroubled as an Alpine scene? Why do we here
desire the flower of some emergent feeling to grow from the air, or
from the soil, or from humanity to greet us? This sense of want evoked
by Southern beauty is perhaps the antique mythopœic yearning. But in
our perplexed life it takes another form, and seems the longing for
emotion, ever fleeting, ever new, unrealised, unreal, insatiable.
II.--OVER THE APENNINES
At Parma we slept in the Albergo della Croce Bianca, which is more a
bric-à-brac shop than an inn; and slept but badly, for the good folk of
Parma twanged guitars and exercised their hoarse male voices all night
in the street below. We were glad when Christian called us, at 5 A.M.,
for an early start across the Apennines. This was the day of a right
Roman journey. In thirteen and a half hours, leaving Parma at 6, and
arriving in Sarzana at 7.30, we flung ourselves across the spine of Italy,
from the plains of Eridanus to the seashore of Etruscan Luna. I had
secured a carriage and extra post-horses the night before; therefore we
found no obstacles upon the road, but eager drivers, quick relays,
obsequious postmasters, change, speed, perpetual movement. The road
itself is a noble one, and nobly entertained in all things but
accommodation for travellers. At Berceto, near the summit of the pass,
we stopped just half an hour, to lunch off a mouldy hen and six eggs;
but that was all the halt we made.
As we drove out of Parma, striking across the plain to the ghiara of the
Taro, the sun rose over the austere autumnal landscape, with its
withered vines and crimson haws. Christian, the mountaineer, who at
home had never seen the sun rise from a flat horizon, stooped from the
box to call attention to this daily recurring miracle, which on the plain
of Lombardy is no less wonderful than on a rolling sea. From the
village of Fornovo, where the Italian League was camped awaiting
Charles VIII. upon that memorable July morn in 1495, the road strikes
suddenly aside, gains a spur of the descending Apennines, and keeps
this vantage till the pass of La Cisa is reached. Many windings are
occasioned by thus adhering to arêtes, but the total result is a gradual
ascent with free prospect over plain and mountain. The Apennines,
built up upon a smaller scale than the Alps, perplexed in detail and
entangled with cross sections and convergent systems, lend themselves
to this plan of carrying highroads along their ridges instead of
following the valley.
What is beautiful in the landscape of that northern watershed is the
subtlety, delicacy, variety, and intricacy of the mountain outlines.
There is drawing wherever the eye falls. Each section of the vast
expanse is a picture of tossed crests and complicated undulations. And
over the whole sea of stationary billows, light is shed like an ethereal
raiment, with spare colour--blue and grey, and parsimonious green--in
the near foreground. The detail is somewhat dry and monotonous; for
these so finely moulded hills are made up of washed earth, the
immemorial wrecks of earlier mountain ranges. Brown villages, not
unlike those of Midland England, low houses built of stone and tiled
with stone, and square-towered churches, occur at rare intervals in
cultivated hollows, where there are fields and fruit trees. Water is
nowhere visible except in the wasteful river-beds. As we rise, we break
into a wilder country, forested with oak, where oxen and goats are
browsing. The turf is starred with lilac gentian and crocus bells, but
sparely. Then comes the highest village, Berceto, with keen Alpine air.
After that, broad rolling downs of yellowing grass and russet
beech-scrub lead onward to the pass La Cisa. The sense of breadth in
composition is continually satisfied through this ascent by the
fine-drawn lines, faint tints, and immense air-spaces of Italian
landscape. Each little piece reminds one of England; but the
geographical scale is enormously more grandiose, and the effect of
majesty proportionately greater.
From La Cisa the road descends suddenly; for the southern escarpment
of the Apennine, as of the Alpine, barrier is pitched at a far steeper
angle than the northern. Yet there is no view of the sea. That is
excluded by the lower hills which hem the Magra. The upper valley is
beautiful, with verdant lawns and purple hillsides breaking down into
thick chestnut woods, through which we wound at a rapid pace for
nearly an hour. The leaves were still green, mellowing to golden; but
the fruit was ripe and heavy, ready at all points to fall. In the still
October air the husks above our heads would loosen, and the brown
nuts rustle through the foliage, and with a dull short thud, like drops of
thunder-rain, break down upon the sod. At the foot of this rich forest,
wedged in between huge buttresses, we found Pontremoli, and changed
our horses here for the last time. It was Sunday, and the little town was
alive with country-folk; tall stalwart fellows wearing peacock's feathers
in their black slouched hats, and nut-brown maids.
From this point the valley of the Magra is exceeding rich with fruit
trees, vines, and olives. The tendrils of the vine are yellow now, and in
some places hued like generous wine; through their thick leaves the sun
shot crimson. In one cool garden, as the day grew dusk, I noticed
quince trees laden with pale fruit entangled with pomegranates--green
spheres and ruddy amid burnished leaves. By the roadside too were
many berries of bright hues; the glowing red of haws and hips, the
amber of the pyracanthus, the rose tints of the spindle-wood. These
make autumn even lovelier than spring. And then there was a wood of
chestnuts carpeted with pale pinkling, a place to dream of in the
twilight. But the main motive of this landscape was the indescribable
Carrara range, an island of pure form and shooting peaks, solid marble,
crystalline in shape and texture, faintly blue against the blue sky, from
which they were but scarce divided. These mountains close the valley
to south-east, and seem as though they belonged to another and more
celestial region.
Soon the sunlight was gone, and moonrise came to close the day, as we
rolled onward to Sarzana, through arundo donax and vine-girdled olive
trees and villages, where contadini lounged upon the bridges. There
was a stream of sound in our ears, and in my brain a rhythmic dance of
beauties caught through the long-drawn glorious golden autumn-day.
III.--FOSDINOVO
The hamlet and the castle of Fosdinovo stand upon a mountain-spur
above Sarzana, commanding the valley of the Magra and the plains of
Luni. This is an ancient fief of the Malaspina House, and is still in the
possession of the Marquis of that name.
The road to Fosdinovo strikes across the level through an avenue of
plane trees, shedding their discoloured leaves. It then takes to the open
fields, bordered with tall reeds waving from the foss on either hand,
where grapes are hanging to the vines. The country-folk allow their
vines to climb into the olives, and these golden festoons are a great
ornament to the grey branches. The berries on the trees are still quite
green, and it is a good olive season. Leaving the main road, we pass a
villa of the Malaspini, shrouded in immense thickets of sweet bay and
ilex, forming a grove for the Nymphs or Pan. Here may you see just
such clean stems and lucid foliage as Gian Bellini painted, inch by inch,
in his Peter Martyr picture. The place is neglected now; the
semicircular seats of white Carrara marble are stained with green
mosses, the altars chipped, the fountains choked with bay leaves; and
the rose trees, escaped from what were once trim garden alleys, have
gone wandering a-riot into country hedges. There is no demarcation
between the great man's villa and the neighbouring farms. From this
point the path rises, and the barren hillside is a-bloom with
late-flowering myrtles. Why did the Greeks consecrate these
myrtle-rods to Death as well as Love? Electra complained that her
father's tomb had not received the honour of the myrtle branch; and the
Athenians wreathed their swords with myrtle in memory of Harmodius.
Thinking of these matters, I cannot but remember lines of Greek, which
have themselves the rectitude and elasticity of myrtle wands:
(Greek:)
kai prospesôn eklaus' erêmias tuchôn spondas te lusas askon hon pherô
xenois espeisa tumbô d'amphethêka mursinas.
As we approach Fosdinovo, the hills above us gain sublimity; the
prospect over plain and sea--the fields where Luna was, the widening
bay of Spezzia--grows ever grander. The castle is a ruin, still capable of
partial habitation, and now undergoing repair--the state in which a ruin
looks most sordid and forlorn. How strange it is, too, that, to enforce
this sense of desolation, sad dishevelled weeds cling ever to such
antique masonry! Here are the henbane, the sow-thistle, the wild
cucumber. At Avignon, at Orvieto, at Dolce Acqua, at Les Baux, we
never missed them. And they have the dusty courtyards, the massive
portals, where portcullises still threaten, of Fosdinovo to themselves.
Over the gate, and here and there on corbels, are carved the arms of
Malaspina--a barren thorn-tree, gnarled with the geometrical precision
of heraldic irony.
Leaning from the narrow windows of this castle, with the spacious
view to westward, I thought of Dante. For Dante in this castle was the
guest of Moroello Malaspina, what time he was yet finishing the
'Inferno.' There is a little old neglected garden, full to south, enclosed
upon a rampart which commands the Borgo, where we found frail
canker-roses and yellow amaryllis. Here, perhaps, he may have sat with
ladies--for this was the Marchesa's pleasaunce; or may have watched
through a short summer's night, until he saw that tremolar della marina,
portending dawn, which afterwards he painted in the 'Purgatory.'
From Fosdinovo one can trace the Magra work its way out seaward, not
into the plain where once the candentia moenia Lunae flashed sunrise
from their battlements, but close beside the little hills which back the
southern arm of the Spezzian gulf. At the extreme end of that
promontory, called Del Corvo, stood the Benedictine convent of S.
Croce; and it was here in 1309, if we may trust to tradition, that Dante,
before his projected journey into France, appeared and left the first part
of his poem with the Prior. Fra Ilario, such was the good father's name,
received commission to transmit the 'Inferno' to Uguccione della
Faggiuola; and he subsequently recorded the fact of Dante's visit in a
letter which, though its genuineness has been called in question, is far
too interesting to be left without allusion. The writer says that on
occasion of a journey into lands beyond the Riviera, Dante visited this
convent, appearing silent and unknown among the monks. To the
Prior's question what he wanted, he gazed upon the brotherhood, and
only answered, 'Peace!' Afterwards, in private conversation, he
communicated his name and spoke about his poem. A portion of the
'Divine Comedy' composed in the Italian tongue aroused Ilario's
wonder, and led him to inquire why his guest had not followed the
usual course of learned poets by committing his thoughts to Latin.
Dante replied that he had first intended to write in that language, and
that he had gone so far as to begin the poem in Virgilian hexameters.
Reflection upon the altered conditions of society in that age led him,
however, to reconsider the matter; and he was resolved to tune another
lyre, 'suited to the sense of modern men.' 'For,' said he, 'it is idle to set
solid food before the lips of sucklings.'
If we can trust Fra Ilario's letter as a genuine record, which is unhappily
a matter of some doubt, we have in this narration not only a picturesque,
almost a melodramatically picturesque glimpse of the poet's apparition
to those quiet monks in their seagirt house of peace, but also an
interesting record of the destiny which presided over the first great
work of literary art in a distinctly modern language.
IV.--LA SPEZZIA
While we were at Fosdinovo the sky filmed over, and there came a halo
round the sun. This portended change; and by evening, after we had
reached La Spezzia, earth, sea, and air were conscious of a coming
tempest. At night I went down to the shore, and paced the sea-wall they
have lately built along the Rada. The moon was up, but overdriven with
dry smoky clouds, now thickening to blackness over the whole bay,
now leaving intervals through which the light poured fitfully and
fretfully upon the wrinkled waves; and ever and anon they shuddered
with electric gleams which were not actual lightning. Heaven seemed to
be descending on the sea; one might have fancied that some powerful
charms were drawing down the moon with influence malign upon those
still resisting billows. For not as yet the gulf was troubled to its depth,
and not as yet the breakers dashed in foam against the
moonlight-smitten promontories. There was but an uneasy murmuring
of wave to wave; a whispering of wind, that stooped its wing and
hissed along the surface, and withdrew into the mystery of clouds again;
a momentary chafing of churned water round the harbour piers,
subsiding into silence petulant and sullen. I leaned against an iron
stanchion and longed for the sea's message. But nothing came to me,
and the drowned secret of Shelley's death those waves which were his
grave revealed not.
Howler and scooper of storms! capricious and dainty sea!
Meanwhile the incantation swelled in shrillness, the electric shudders
deepened. Alone in this elemental overture to tempest I took no note of
time, but felt, through self-abandonment to the symphonic influence,
how sea and air, and clouds akin to both, were dealing with each other
complainingly, and in compliance to some maker of unrest within them.
A touch upon my shoulder broke this trance; I turned and saw a boy
beside me in a coastguard's uniform. Francesco was on patrol that night;
but my English accent soon assured him that I was no contrabbandiere,
and he too leaned against the stanchion and told me his short story. He
was in his nineteenth year, and came from Florence, where his people
live in the Borgo Ognissanti. He had all the brightness of the Tuscan
folk, a sort of innocent malice mixed with espieglerie. It was diverting
to see the airs he gave himself on the strength of his new military
dignity, his gun, and uniform, and night duty on the shore. I could not
help humming to myself Non più andrai; for Francesco was a sort of
Tuscan Cherubino. We talked about picture galleries and libraries in
Florence, and I had to hear his favourite passages from the Italian poets.
And then there came the plots of Jules Verne's stories and marvellous
narrations about l' uomo cavallo, l' uomo volante, l' uomo pesce. The
last of these personages turned out to be Paolo Boÿnton (so
pronounced), who had swam the Arno in his diving dress, passing the
several bridges, and when he came to the great weir 'allora tutti stare
con bocca aperta.' Meanwhile the storm grew serious, and our
conversation changed. Francesco told me about the terrible sun-stricken
sand shores of the Riviera, burning in summer noon, over which the
coast-guard has to tramp, their perils from falling stones in storm, and
the trains that come rushing from those narrow tunnels on the midnight
line of march. It is a hard life; and the thirst for adventure which drove
this boy--'il più matto di tutta la famiglia'--to adopt it, seems well-nigh
quenched. And still, with a return to Giulio Verne, he talked
enthusiastically of deserting, of getting on board a merchant ship, and
working his way to southern islands where wonders are.
A furious blast swept the whole sky for a moment almost clear. The
moonlight fell, with racing cloud-shadows, upon sea and hills, the
lights of Lerici, the great fanali at the entrance of the gulf, and
Francesco's upturned handsome face. Then all again was whirled in
mist and foam; one breaker smote the sea wall in a surge of froth,
another plunged upon its heels; with inconceivable swiftness came rain;
lightning deluged the expanse of surf, and showed the windy trees bent
landward by the squall. It was long past midnight now, and the storm
was on us for the space of three days.
V.--PORTO VENERE
For the next three days the wind went worrying on, and a line of surf
leapt on the sea-wall always to the same height. The hills all around
were inky black and weary.
At night the wild libeccio still rose, with floods of rain and lightning
poured upon the waste. I thought of the Florentine patrol. Is he out in it,
and where?
At last there came a lull. When we rose on the fourth morning, the sky
was sulky, spent and sleepy after storm--the air as soft and tepid as
boiled milk or steaming flannel. We drove along the shore to Porto
Venere, passing the arsenals and dockyards, which have changed the
face of Spezzia since Shelley knew it. This side of the gulf is not so
rich in vegetation as the other, probably because it lies open to the
winds from the Carrara mountains. The chestnuts come down to the
shore in many places, bringing with them the wild mountain-side. To
make up for this lack of luxuriance, the coast is furrowed with a
succession of tiny harbours, where the fishing-boats rest at anchor.
There are many villages upon the spurs of hills, and on the headlands
naval stations, hospitals, lazzaretti, and prisons. A prickly bindweed
(the Smilax Sarsaparilla) forms a feature in the near landscape, with its
creamy odoriferous blossoms, coral berries, and glossy thorned leaves.
A turn of the road brought Porto Venere in sight, and on its grey walls
flashed a gleam of watery sunlight. The village consists of one long
narrow street, the houses on the left side hanging sheer above the sea.
Their doors at the back open on to cliffs which drop about fifty feet
upon the water. A line of ancient walls, with mediaeval battlements and
shells of chambers suspended midway between earth and sky, runs up
the rock behind the town; and this wall is pierced with a deep gateway
above which the inn is piled. We had our lunch in a room opening upon
the town-gate, adorned with a deep-cut Pisan arch enclosing images
and frescoes--a curious episode in a place devoted to the jollity of
smugglers and seafaring folk. The whole house was such as Tintoretto
loved to paint--huge wooden rafters; open chimneys with pent-house
canopies of stone, where the cauldrons hung above logs of chestnut;
rude low tables spread with coarse linen embroidered at the edges, and
laden with plates of fishes, fruit, quaint glass, big-bellied jugs of
earthenware, and flasks of yellow wine. The people of the place were
lounging round in lazy attitudes. There were odd nooks and corners
everywhere; unexpected staircases with windows slanting through the
thickness of the town-wall; pictures of saints; high-zoned serving
women, on whose broad shoulders lay big coral beads;
smoke-blackened roofs, and balconies that opened on the sea. The
house was inexhaustible in motives for pictures.
We walked up the street, attended by a rabble rout of boys--diavoli
scatenati--clean, grinning, white-teethed, who kept incessantly
shouting, 'Soldo, soldo!' I do not know why these sea-urchins are so far
more irrepressible than their land brethren. But it is always thus in Italy.
They take an imperturbable delight in noise and mere annoyance. I
shall never forget the sea-roar of Porto Venere, with that shrill obligate,
'Soldo, soldo, soldo!' rattling like a dropping fire from lungs of brass.
At the end of Porto Venere is a withered and abandoned city, climbing
the cliffs of S. Pietro; and on the headland stands the ruined church,
built by Pisans with alternate rows of white and black marble, upon the
site of an old temple of Venus. This is a modest and pure piece of
Gothic architecture, fair in desolation, refined and dignified, and not
unworthy in its grace of the dead Cyprian goddess. Through its broken
lancets the sea-wind whistles and the vast reaches of the Tyrrhene gulf
are seen. Samphire sprouts between the blocks of marble, and in
sheltered nooks the caper hangs her beautiful purpureal snowy bloom.
The headland is a bold block of white limestone stained with red. It has
the pitch of Exmoor stooping to the sea near Lynton. To north, as one
looks along the coast, the line is broken by Porto Fino's amethystine
promontory; and in the vaporous distance we could trace the Riviera
mountains, shadowy and blue. The sea came roaring, rolling in with
tawny breakers; but, far out, it sparkled in pure azure, and the
cloud-shadows over it were violet. Where Corsica should have been
seen, soared banks of fleecy, broad-domed alabaster clouds.
This point, once dedicated to Venus, now to Peter--both, be it
remembered, fishers of men--is one of the most singular in Europe. The
island of Palmaria, rich in veined marbles, shelters the port; so that
outside the sea rages, while underneath the town, reached by a narrow
strait, there is a windless calm. It was not without reason that our Lady
of Beauty took this fair gulf to herself; and now that she has long been
dispossessed, her memory lingers yet in names. For Porto Venere
remembers her, and Lerici is only Eryx. There is a grotto here, where
an inscription tells us that Byron once 'tempted the Ligurian waves.' It
is just such a natural sea-cave as might have inspired Euripides when
he described the refuge of Orestes in 'Iphigenia.'
VI.--LERICI
Libeccio at last had swept the sky clear. The gulf was ridged with
foam-fleeced breakers, and the water churned into green, tawny wastes.
But overhead there flew the softest clouds, all silvery, dispersed in
flocks. It is the day for pilgrimage to what was Shelley's home.
After following the shore a little way, the road to Lerici breaks into the
low hills which part La Spezzia from Sarzana. The soil is red, and
overgrown with arbutus and pinaster, like the country around Cannes.
Through the scattered trees it winds gently upwards, with frequent
views across the gulf, and then descends into a land rich with olives--a
genuine Riviera landscape, where the mountain-slopes are hoary, and
spikelets of innumerable light-flashing leaves twinkle against a blue sea,
misty-deep. The walls here are not unfrequently adorned with basreliefs
of Carrara marble--saints and madonnas very delicately wrought, as
though they were love-labours of sculptors who had passed a summer
on this shore. San Terenzio is soon discovered low upon the sands to
the right, nestling under little cliffs; and then the high-built castle of
Lerici comes in sight, looking across, the bay to Porto Venere--one
Aphrodite calling to the other, with the foam between. The village is
piled around its cove with tall and picturesquely coloured houses; the
molo and the fishing-boats lie just beneath the castle. There is one point
of the descending carriage road where all this gracefulness is seen,
framed by the boughs of olive branches, swaying, wind-ruffled,
laughing the many-twinkling smiles of ocean back from their grey
leaves. Here Erycina ridens is at home. And, as we stayed to dwell
upon the beauty of the scene, came women from the bay
below--barefooted, straight as willow wands, with burnished copper
bowls upon their heads. These women have the port of goddesses,
deep-bosomed, with the length of thigh and springing ankles that
betoken strength no less than elasticity and grace. The hair of some of
them was golden, rippling in little curls around brown brows and
glowing eyes. Pale lilac blent with orange on their dress, and coral
beads hung from their ears.
At Lerici we took a boat and pushed into the rolling breakers. Christian
now felt the movement of the sea for the first time. This was rather a
rude trial, for the grey-maned monsters played, as it seemed, at will
with our cockle-shell, tumbling in dolphin curves to reach the shore.
Our boatmen knew all about Shelley and the Casa Magni. It is not at
Lerici, but close to San Terenzio, upon the south side of the village.
Looking across the bay from the molo, one could clearly see its square
white mass, tiled roof, and terrace built on rude arcades with a broad
orange awning. Trelawny's description hardly prepares one for so
considerable a place. I think the English exiles of that period must have
been exacting if the Casa Magni seemed to them no better than a
bathing-house.
We left our boat at the jetty, and walked through some gardens to the
villa. There we were kindly entertained by the present occupiers, who,
when I asked them whether such visits as ours were not a great
annoyance, gently but feelingly replied: 'It is not so bad now as it used
to be.' The English gentleman who rents the Casa Magni has known it
uninterruptedly since Shelley's death, and has used it for villeggiatura
during the last thirty years. We found him in the central sitting-room,
which readers of Trelawny's 'Recollections' have so often pictured to
themselves. The large oval table, the settees round the walls, and some
of the pictures are still unchanged. As we sat talking, I laughed to think
of that luncheon party, when Shelley lost his clothes, and came naked,
dripping with sea-water, into the room, protected by the skirts of the
sympathising waiting-maid. And then I wondered where they found
him on the night when he stood screaming in his sleep, after the vision
of his veiled self, with its question, 'Siete soddisfatto?'
There were great ilexes behind the house in Shelley's time, which have
been cut down, and near these he is said to have sat and written the
'Triumph of Life.' Some new houses, too, have been built between the
villa and the town; otherwise the place is unaltered. Only an awning
has been added to protect the terrace from the sun. I walked out on this
terrace, where Shelley used to listen to Jane's singing. The sea was
fretting at its base, just as Mrs. Shelley says it did when the Don Juan
disappeared.
From San Terenzio we walked back to Lerici through olive woods,
attended by a memory which toned the almost overpowering beauty of
the place to sadness.
VII.--VIAREGGIO
The same memory drew us, a few days later, to the spot where
Shelley's body was burned. Viareggio is fast becoming a fashionable
watering-place for the people of Florence and Lucca, who seek fresher
air and simpler living than Livorno offers. It has the usual new inns and
improvised lodging-houses of such places, built on the outskirts of a
little fishing village, with a boundless stretch of noble sands. There is a
wooden pier on which we walked, watching the long roll of waves,
foam-flaked, and quivering with moonlight. The Apennines faded into
the grey sky beyond, and the sea-wind was good to breathe. There is a
feeling of 'immensity, liberty, action' here, which is not common in
Italy. It reminds us of England; and to-night the Mediterranean had the
rough force of a tidal sea.
Morning revealed beauty enough in Viareggio to surprise even one who
expects from Italy all forms of loveliness. The sand-dunes stretch for
miles between the sea and a low wood of stone pines, with the Carrara
hills descending from their glittering pinnacles by long lines to the
headlands of the Spezzian Gulf. The immeasurable distance was all
painted in sky-blue and amethyst; then came the golden green of the
dwarf firs; and then dry yellow in the grasses of the dunes; and then the
many-tinted sea, with surf tossed up against the furthest cliffs. It is a
wonderful and tragic view, to which no painter but the Roman Costa
has done justice; and he, it may be said, has made this landscape of the
Carrarese his own. The space between sand and pine-wood was
covered with faint, yellow, evening primroses. They flickered like little
harmless flames in sun and shadow, and the spires of the Carrara range
were giant flames transformed to marble. The memory of that day
described by Trelawny in a passage of immortal English prose, when
he and Byron and Leigh Hunt stood beside the funeral pyre, and
libations were poured, and the 'Cor Cordium' was found inviolate
among the ashes, turned all my thoughts to flame beneath the gentle
autumn sky.
Still haunted by these memories, we took the carriage road to Pisa, over
which Shelley's friends had hurried to and fro through those last days.
It passes an immense forest of stone-pines--aisles and avenues;
undergrowth of ilex, laurustinus, gorse, and myrtle; the crowded
cyclamens, the solemn silence of the trees; the winds hushed in their
velvet roof and stationary domes of verdure.
*****
PARMA
Parma is perhaps the brightest Residenzstadt of the second class in Italy.
Built on a sunny and fertile tract of the Lombard plain, within view of
the Alps, and close beneath the shelter of the Apennines, it shines like a
well-set gem with stately towers and cheerful squares in the midst of
verdure. The cities of Lombardy are all like large country houses:
walking out of their gates, you seem to be stepping from a door or
window that opens on a trim and beautiful garden, where mulberry-tree
is married to mulberry by festoons of vines, and where the maize and
sunflower stand together in rows between patches of flax and hemp.
But it is not in order to survey the union of well-ordered husbandry
with the civilities of ancient city-life that we break the journey at Parma
between Milan and Bologna. We are attracted rather by the fame of one
great painter, whose work, though it may be studied piecemeal in many
galleries of Europe, in Parma has a fulness, largeness, and mastery that
can nowhere else be found. In Parma alone Correggio challenges
comparison with Raphael, with Tintoret, with all the supreme
decorative painters who have deigned to make their art the handmaid of
architecture. Yet even in the cathedral and the church of S. Giovanni,
where Correggio's frescoes cover cupola and chapel wall, we could
scarcely comprehend his greatness now--so cruelly have time and
neglect dealt with those delicate dream-shadows of celestial
fairyland--were it not for an interpreter, who consecrated a lifetime to
the task of translating his master's poetry of fresco into the prose of
engraving. That man was Paolo Toschi--a name to be ever venerated by
all lovers of the arts; since without his guidance we should hardly know
what to seek for in the ruined splendours of the domes of Parma, or
even seeking, how to find the object of our search. Toschi's labour was
more effectual than that of a restorer however skilful, more loving than
that of a follower however faithful. He respected Correggio's
handiwork with religious scrupulousness, adding not a line or tone or
touch of colour to the fading frescoes; but he lived among them, aloft
on scaffoldings, and face to face with the originals which he designed
to reproduce. By long and close familiarity, by obstinate and patient
interrogation, he divined Correggio's secret, and was able at last to see
clearly through the mist of cobweb and mildew and altar smoke, and
through the still more cruel travesty of so-called restoration. What he
discovered, he faithfully committed first to paper in water colours, and
then to copperplate with the burin, so that we enjoy the privilege of
seeing Correggio's masterpieces as Toschi saw them, with the eyes of
genius and of love and of long scientific study. It is not too much to say
that some of Correggio's most charming compositions--for example,
the dispute of S. Augustine and S. John--have been resuscitated from
the grave by Toschi's skill. The original offers nothing but a
mouldering surface from which the painter's work has dropped in scales.
The engraving presents a design which we doubt not was Correggio's,
for it corresponds in all particulars to the style and spirit of the master.
To be critical in dealing with so successful an achievement of
restoration and translation is difficult. Yet it may be admitted once and
for all that Toschi has not unfrequently enfeebled his original. Under
his touch Correggio loses somewhat of his sensuous audacity, his
dithyrambic ecstasy, and approaches the ordinary standard of prettiness
and graceful beauty. The Diana of the Camera di S. Paolo, for instance,
has the strong calm splendour of a goddess: the same Diana in Toschi's
engraving seems about to smile with girlish joy. In a word, the engraver
was a man of a more common stamp--more timid and more
conventional than the painter. But this is after all a trifling deduction
from the value of his work.
Our debt to Paolo Toschi is such that it would be ungrateful not to seek
some details of his life. The few that can be gathered even at Parma are
brief and bald enough. The newspaper articles and funeral panegyrics
which refer to him are as barren as all such occasional notices in Italy
have always been; the panegyrist seeming more anxious about his own
style than eager to communicate information. Yet a bare outline of
Toschi's biography may be supplied. He was born at Parma in 1788.
His father was cashier of the post-office, and his mother's name was
Anna Maria Brest. Early in his youth he studied painting at Parma
under Biagio Martini; and in 1809 he went to Paris, where he learned
the art of engraving from Bervic and of etching from Oortman. In Paris
he contracted an intimate friendship with the painter Gérard. But after
ten years he returned to Parma, where he established a company and
school of engravers in concert with his friend Antonio Isac. Maria
Louisa, the then Duchess, under whose patronage the arts flourished at
Parma (witness Bodoni's exquisite typography), soon recognised his
merit, and appointed him Director of the Ducal Academy. He then
formed the project of engraving a series of the whole of Correggio's
frescoes. The undertaking was a vast one. Both the cupolas of S. John
and the cathedral, together with the vault of the apse of S. Giovanni[10]
and various portions of the side aisles, and the so-called Camera di S.
Paolo, are covered by frescoes of Correggio and his pupil Parmegiano.
These frescoes have suffered so much from neglect and time, and from
unintelligent restoration, that it is difficult in many cases to determine
their true character. Yet Toschi did not content himself with selections,
or shrink from the task of deciphering and engraving the whole. He
formed a school of disciples, among whom were Carlo Raimondi of
Milan, Antonio Costa of Venice, Edward Eichens of Berlin, Aloisio
Juvara of Naples, Antonio Dalcò, Giuseppe Magnani, and Lodovico
Bisola of Parma, and employed them as assistants in his work. Death
overtook him in 1854, before it was finished, and now the water-colour
drawings which are exhibited in the Gallery of Parma prove to what
extent the achievement fell short of his design. Enough, however, was
accomplished to place the chief masterpieces of Correggio beyond the
possibility of utter oblivion.
To the piety of his pupil Carlo Raimondi, the bearer of a name
illustrious in the annals of engraving, we owe a striking portrait of
Toschi. The master is represented on his seat upon the scaffold in the
dizzy half-light of the dome. The shadowy forms of saints and angels
are around him. He has raised his eyes from his cartoon to study one of
these. In his right hand is the opera-glass with which he scrutinises the
details of distant groups. The upturned face, with its expression of
contemplative intelligence, is like that of an astronomer accustomed to
commerce with things above the sphere of common life, and ready to
give account of all that he has gathered from his observation of a world
not ours. In truth the world created by Correggio and interpreted by
Toschi is very far removed from that of actual existence. No painter has
infused a more distinct individuality into his work, realising by
imaginative force and powerful projection an order of beauty peculiar
to himself, before which it is impossible to remain quite indifferent. We
must either admire the manner of Correggio, or else shrink from it with
the distaste which sensual art is apt to stir in natures of a severe or
simple type.
What, then, is the Correggiosity of Correggio? In other words, what is
the characteristic which, proceeding from the personality of the artist, is
impressed on all his work? The answer to this question, though by no
means simple, may perhaps be won by a process of gradual analysis.
The first thing that strikes us in the art of Correggio is, that he has
aimed at the realistic representation of pure unrealities. His saints and
angels are beings the like of whom we have hardly seen upon the earth.
Yet they are displayed before us with all the movement and the vivid
truth of nature. Next we feel that what constitutes the superhuman,
visionary quality of these creatures, is their uniform beauty of a merely
sensuous type. They are all created for pleasure, not for thought or
passion or activity or heroism. The uses of their brains, their limbs,
their every feature, end in enjoyment; innocent and radiant wantonness
is the condition of their whole existence. Correggio conceived the
universe under the one mood of sensuous joy: his world was bathed in
luxurious light; its inhabitants were capable of little beyond a soft
voluptuousness. Over the domain of tragedy he had no sway, and very
rarely did he attempt to enter on it: nothing, for example, can be feebler
than his endeavour to express anguish in the distorted features of
Madonna, S. John, and the Magdalen, who are bending over the dead
body of a Christ extended in the attitude of languid repose. In like
manner he could not deal with subjects which demand a pregnancy of
intellectual meaning. He paints the three Fates like young and joyous
Bacchantes, places rose-garlands and thyrsi in their hands instead of the
distaff and the thread of human destinies, and they might figure
appropriately upon the panels of a banquet-chamber in Pompeii. In this
respect Correggio might be termed the Rossini of painting. The
melodies of the 'Stabat Mater'--Fac ut portem or Quis est homo--are the
exact analogues in music of Correggio's voluptuous renderings of grave
or mysterious motives. Nor, again, did he possess that severe and lofty
art of composition which subordinates the fancy to the reason, and
which seeks for the highest intellectual beauty in a kind of architectural
harmony supreme above the melodies of gracefulness in detail. The
Florentines and those who shared their spirit--Michelangelo and
Lionardo and Raphael--deriving this principle of design from the
geometrical art of the Middle Ages, converted it to the noblest uses in
their vast well-ordered compositions. But Correggio ignored the laws
of scientific construction. It was enough for him to produce a splendid
and brilliant effect by the life and movement of his figures, and by the
intoxicating beauty of his forms. His type of beauty, too, is by no
means elevated. Lionardo painted souls whereof the features and the
limbs are but an index. The charm of Michelangelo's ideal is like a
flower upon a tree of rugged strength. Raphael aims at the loveliness
which cannot be disjoined from goodness. But Correggio is contented
with bodies 'delicate and desirable.' His angels are genii disimprisoned
from the perfumed chalices of flowers, houris of an erotic paradise,
elemental spirits of nature wantoning in Eden in her prime. To accuse
the painter of conscious immorality or of what is stigmatised as
sensuality, would be as ridiculous as to class his seraphic beings among
the products of the Christian imagination. They belong to the
generation of the fauns; like fauns, they combine a certain savage
wildness, a dithyrambic ecstasy of inspiration, a delight in rapid
movement as they revel amid clouds or flowers, with the permanent
and all-pervading sweetness of the master's style. When infantine or
childlike, these celestial sylphs are scarcely to be distinguished for any
noble quality of beauty from Murillo's cherubs, and are far less divine
than the choir of children who attend Madonna in Titian's 'Assumption.'
But in their boyhood and their prime of youth, they acquire a fulness of
sensuous vitality and a radiance that are peculiar to Correggio. The
lily-bearer who helps to support S. Thomas beneath the dome of the
cathedral at Parma, the groups of seraphs who crowd behind the
Incoronata of S. Giovanni, and the two wild-eyed open-mouthed S.
Johns stationed at each side of the celestial throne, are among the most
splendid instances of the adolescent loveliness conceived by Correggio.
Where the painter found their models may be questioned but not
answered; for he has made them of a different fashion from the race of
mortals: no court of Roman emperor or Turkish sultan, though stocked
with the flowers of Bithynian and Circassian youth, have seen their like.
Mozart's Cherubino seems to have sat for all of them. At any rate they
incarnate the very spirit of the songs he sings.
As a consequence of this predilection for sensuous and voluptuous
forms, Correggio had no power of imagining grandly or severely.
Satisfied with material realism in his treatment even of sublime
mysteries, he converts the hosts of heaven into a 'fricassee of frogs,'
according to the old epigram. His apostles, gazing after the Virgin who
has left the earth, are thrown into attitudes so violent and so
dramatically foreshortened, that seen from below upon the pavement of
the cathedral, little of their form is distinguishable except legs and arms
in vehement commotion. Very different is Titian's conception of this
scene. To express the spiritual meaning, the emotion of Madonna's
transit, with all the pomp which colour and splendid composition can
convey, is Titian's sole care; whereas Correggio appears to have been
satisfied with realising the tumult of heaven rushing to meet earth, and
earth straining upwards to ascend to heaven in violent commotion--a
very orgasm of frenetic rapture. The essence of the event is forgotten:
its external manifestation alone is presented to the eye; and only the
accessories of beardless angels and cloud-encumbered cherubs are
really beautiful amid a surge of limbs in restless movement. More
dignified, because designed with more repose, is the Apocalypse of S.
John painted upon the cupola of S. Giovanni. The apostles throned on
clouds, with which the dome is filled, gaze upward to one point. Their
attitudes are noble; their form is heroic; in their eyes there is the strange
ecstatic look by which Correggio interpreted his sense of supernatural
vision: it is a gaze not of contemplation or deep thought, but of wild
half-savage joy, as if these saints also had become the elemental genii
of cloud and air, spirits emergent from ether, the salamanders of an
empyrean intolerable to mortal sense. The point on which their eyes
converge, the culmination of their vision, is the figure of Christ. Here
all the weakness of Correggio's method is revealed. He had undertaken
to realise by no ideal allegorical suggestion, by no symbolism of
architectural grouping, but by actual prosaic measurement, by corporeal
form in subjection to the laws of perspective and foreshortening, things
which in their very essence admit of only a figurative revelation.
Therefore his Christ, the centre of all those earnest eyes, is contracted
to a shape in which humanity itself is mean, a sprawling figure which
irresistibly reminds one of a frog. The clouds on which the saints
repose are opaque and solid; cherubs in countless multitudes, a swarm
of merry children, crawl about upon these feather-beds of vapour, creep
between the legs of the apostles, and play at bopeep behind their
shoulders. There is no propriety in their appearance there. They take no
interest in the beatific vision. They play no part in the celestial
symphony; nor are they capable of more than merely infantine
enjoyment. Correggio has sprinkled them lavishly like living flowers
about his cloudland, because he could not sustain a grave and solemn
strain of music, but was forced by his temperament to overlay the
melody with roulades. Gazing at these frescoes, the thought came to me
that Correggio was like a man listening to sweetest flute-playing, and
translating phrase after phrase as they passed through his fancy into
laughing faces, breezy tresses, and rolling mists. Sometimes a grander
cadence reached his ear; and then S. Peter with the keys, or S.
Augustine of the mighty brow, or the inspired eyes of S. John, took
form beneath his pencil. But the light airs returned, and rose and lily
faces bloomed again for him among the clouds. It is not therefore in
dignity or sublimity that Correggio excels, but in artless grace and
melodious tenderness. The Madonna della Scala clasping her baby with
a caress which the little child returns, S. Catherine leaning in a rapture
of ecstatic love to wed the infant Christ, S. Sebastian in the bloom of
almost boyish beauty, are the so-called sacred subjects to which the
painter was adequate, and which he has treated with the voluptuous
tenderness we find in his pictures of Leda and Danae and Io. Could
these saints and martyrs descend from Correggio's canvas, and take
flesh, and breathe, and begin to live; of what high action, of what grave
passion, of what exemplary conduct in any walk of life would they be
capable? That is the question which they irresistibly suggest; and we
are forced to answer, None! The moral and religious world did not exist
for Correggio. His art was but a way of seeing carnal beauty in a dream
that had no true relation to reality.
Correggio's sensibility to light and colour was exactly on a par with his
feeling for form. He belongs to the poets of chiaroscuro and the poets
of colouring; but in both regions he maintains the individuality so
strongly expressed in his choice of purely sensuous beauty. Tintoretto
makes use of light and shade for investing his great compositions with
dramatic intensity. Rembrandt interprets sombre and fantastic moods of
the mind by golden gloom and silvery irradiation, translating thought
into the language of penumbral mystery. Lionardo studies the laws of
light scientifically, so that the proper roundness and effect of distance
should be accurately rendered, and all the subtleties of nature's smiles
be mimicked. Correggio is content with fixing on his canvas the [Greek:
anêrithmon gelasma], the many-twinkling laughter of light in motion,
rained down through fleecy clouds or trembling foliage, melting into
half-shadows, bathing and illuminating every object with a soft caress.
There are no tragic contrasts of splendour sharply defined on blackness,
no mysteries of half-felt and pervasive twilight, no studied accuracies
of noonday clearness in his work. Light and shadow are woven together
on his figures like an impalpable Coan gauze, aërial and transparent,
enhancing the palpitations of voluptuous movement which he loved.
His colouring, in like manner, has none of the superb and mundane
pomp which the Venetians affected; it does not glow or burn or beat the
fire of gems into our brain; joyous and wanton, it seems to be exactly
such a beauty-bloom as sense requires for its satiety. There is nothing
in his hues to provoke deep passion or to stimulate the yearnings of the
soul: the pure blushes of the dawn and the crimson pyres of sunset are
nowhere in the world that he has painted. But that chord of jocund
colour which may fitly be married to the smiles of light, the blues
which are found in laughing eyes, the pinks that tinge the cheeks of
early youth, and the warm yet silvery tones of healthy flesh, mingle as
in a marvellous pearl-shell on his pictures. Both chiaroscuro and
colouring have this supreme purpose in art, to effect the sense like
music, and like music to create a mood in the soul of the spectator.
Now the mood which Correggio stimulates is one of natural and
thoughtless pleasure. To feel his influence, and at the same moment to
be the subject of strong passion, or fierce lust, or heroic resolve, or
profound contemplation, or pensive melancholy, is impossible.
Wantonness, innocent because unconscious of sin, immoral because
incapable of any serious purpose, is the quality which prevails in all
that he has painted. The pantomimes of a Mohammedan paradise might
be put upon the stage after patterns supplied by this least spiritual of
painters.
It follows from this analysis that the Correggiosity of Correggio, that
which sharply distinguished him from all previous artists, was the
faculty of painting a purely voluptuous dream of beautiful beings in
perpetual movement, beneath the laughter of morning light, in a world
of never-failing April hues. When he attempts to depart from the
fairyland of which he was the Prospero, and to match himself with the
masters of sublime thought or earnest passion, he proves his weakness.
But within his own magic circle he reigns supreme, no other artist
having blended the witcheries of colouring, chiaroscuro,and faunlike
loveliness of form into a harmony so perfect in its sensuous charm.
Bewitched by the strains of the siren, we pardon affectations of
expression, emptiness of meaning, feebleness of composition,
exaggerated and melodramatic attitudes. There is what Goethe called a
demonic influence in the art of Correggio: 'In poetry,' said Goethe to
Eckermann, 'especially in that which is unconscious, before which
reason and understanding fall short, and which therefore produces
effects so far surpassing all conception, there is always something
demonic.' It is not to be wondered that Correggio, possessed of this
demonic power in the highest degree, and working to a purely sensuous
end, should have exercised a fatal influence over art. His successors,
attracted by an intoxicating loveliness which they could not analyse,
which had nothing in common with the reason or the understanding,
but was like a glamour cast upon the soul in its most secret sensibilities,
threw themselves blindly into the imitation of Correggio's faults. His
affectation, his want of earnest thought, his neglect of composition, his
sensuous realism, his all-pervading sweetness, his infantine prettiness,
his substitution of thaumaturgical effects for conscientious labour,
admitted only too easy imitation, and were but too congenial with the
spirit of the late Renaissance. Cupolas through the length and breadth
of Italy began to be covered with clouds and simpering cherubs in the
convulsions of artificial ecstasy. The attenuated elegance of Parmigiano,
the attitudinising of Anselmi's saints and angels, and a general sacrifice
of what is solid and enduring to sentimental gewgaws on the part of all
painters who had submitted to the magic of Correggio, proved how
easy it was to go astray with the great master. Meanwhile no one could
approach him in that which was truly his own--the delineation of a
transient moment in the life of sensuous beauty, the painting of a smile
on Nature's face, when light and colour tremble in harmony with the
movement of joyous living creatures. Another demonic nature of a far
more powerful type contributed his share to the ruin of art in Italy.
Michelangelo's constrained attitudes and muscular anatomy were
imitated by painters and sculptors, who thought that the grand style lay
in the presentation of theatrical athletes, but who could not seize the
secret whereby the great master made even the bodies of men and
women--colossal trunks and writhen limbs--interpret the meanings of
his deep and melancholy soul.
It is a sad law of progress in art, that when the æsthetic impulse is on
the wane, artists should perforce select to follow the weakness rather
than the vigour, of their predecessors. While painting was in the
ascendant, Raphael could take the best of Perugino and discard the
worst; in its decadence Parmigiano reproduces the affectations of
Correggio, and Bernini carries the exaggerations of Michelangelo to
absurdity. All arts describe a parabola. The force which produces them
causes them to rise throughout their growth up to a certain point, and
then to descend more gradually in a long and slanting line of regular
declension. There is no real break of continuity. The end is the result of
simple exhaustion. Thus the last of our Elizabethan dramatists, Shirley
and Crowne and Killigrew, pushed to its ultimate conclusion the
principle inherent in Marlowe, not attempting to break new ground, nor
imitating the excellences so much as the defects of their forerunners.
Thus too the Pointed style of architecture in England gave birth first to
what is called the Decorated, next to the Perpendicular, and finally
expired in the Tudor. Each step was a step of progress--at first for the
better--at last for the worse--but logical, continuous, necessitated.[11]
It is difficult to leave Correggio without at least posing the question of
the difference between moralised and merely sensual art. Is all art
excellent in itself and good in its effect that is beautiful and earnest?
There is no doubt that Correggio's work is in a way most beautiful; and
it bears unmistakable signs of the master having given himself with
single-hearted devotion to the expression of that phase of loveliness
which he could apprehend. In so far we must admit that his art is both
excellent and solid. Yet we are unable to conceive that any human
being could be made better--stronger for endurance, more fitted for the
uses of the world, more sensitive to what is noble in nature--by its
contemplation. At the best Correggio does but please us in our lighter
moments, and we are apt to feel that the pleasure he has given is of an
enervating kind. To expect obvious morality of any artist is confessedly
absurd. It is not the artist's province to preach, or even to teach, except
by remote suggestion. Yet the mind of the artist may be highly
moralised, and then he takes rank not merely with the ministers to
refined pleasure, but also with the educators of the world. He may, for
example, be penetrated with a just sense of humanity like Shakspere, or
with a sublime temperance like Sophocles, instinct with prophetic
intuition like Michelangelo, or with passionate experience like
Beethoven. The mere sight of the work of Pheidias is like breathing
pure health-giving air. Milton and Dante were steeped in religious
patriotism; Goethe was pervaded with philosophy, and Balzac with
scientific curiosity. Ariosto, Cervantes, and even Boccaccio are masters
in the mysteries of common life. In all these cases the tone of the
artist's mind is felt throughout his work: what he paints, or sings, or
writes, conveys a lesson while it pleases. On the other hand, depravity
in an artist or a poet percolates through work which has in it nothing
positive of evil, and a very miasma of poisonous influence may rise
from the apparently innocuous creations of a tainted soul. Now
Correggio is moralised in neither way--neither as a good nor as a bad
man, neither as an acute thinker nor as a deliberate voluptuary. He is
simply sensuous. On his own ground he is even very fresh and healthy:
his delineation of youthful maternity, for example, is as true as it is
beautiful; and his sympathy with the gleefulness of children is devoid
of affectation. We have then only to ask ourselves whether the defect in
him of all thought and feeling which is not at once capable of graceful
fleshly incarnation, be sufficient to lower him in the scale of artists.
This question must of course be answered according to our definition
of the purposes of art. There is no doubt that the most highly organised
art--that which absorbs the most numerous human qualities and effects
a harmony between the most complex elements--is the noblest.
Therefore the artist who combines moral elevation and power of
thought with a due appreciation of sensual beauty, is more elevated and
more beneficial than one whose domain is simply that of carnal
loveliness. Correggio, if this be so, must take a comparatively low rank.
Just as we welcome the beautiful athlete for the radiant life that is in
him, but bow before the personality of Sophocles, whose perfect form
enshrined a noble and highly educated soul, so we gratefully accept
Correggio for his grace, while we approach the consummate art of
Michelangelo with reverent awe. It is necessary in æsthetics as
elsewhere to recognise a hierarchy of excellence, the grades of which
are determined by the greater or less comprehensiveness of the artist's
nature expressed in his work. At the same time, the calibre of the
artist's genius must be estimated; for eminent greatness even of a
narrow kind will always command our admiration: and the amount of
his originality has also to be taken into account. What is unique has, for
that reason alone, a claim on our consideration. Judged in this way,
Correggio deserves a place, say, in the sweet planet Venus, above the
moon and above Mercury, among the artists who have not advanced
beyond the contemplations which find their proper outcome in love.
Yet, even thus, he aids the culture of humanity. 'We should take care,'
said Goethe, apropos of Byron, to Eckermann, 'not to be always
looking for culture in the decidedly pure and moral. Everything that is
great promotes cultivation as soon as we are aware of it.'
*****
CANOSSA
Italy is less the land of what is venerable in antiquity, than of beauty,
by divine right young eternally in spite of age. This is due partly to her
history and art and literature, partly to the temper of the races who have
made her what she is, and partly to her natural advantages. Her oldest
architectural remains, the temples of Paestum and Girgenti, or the gates
of Perugia and Volterra, are so adapted to Italian landscape and so
graceful in their massive strength, that we forget the centuries which
have passed over them. We leap as by a single bound from the times of
Roman greatness to the new birth of humanity in the fourteenth century,
forgetting the many years during which Italy, like the rest of Europe,
was buried in what our ancestors called Gothic barbarism. The
illumination cast upon the classic period by the literature of Rome and
by the memory of her great men is so vivid, that we feel the days of the
Republic and the Empire to be near us; while the Italian Renaissance is
so truly a revival of that former splendour, a resumption of the music
interrupted for a season, that it is extremely difficult to form any
conception of the five long centuries which elapsed between the
Lombard invasion in 568 and the accession of Hildebrand to the
Pontificate in 1073. So true is it that nothing lives and has reality for us
but what is spiritual, intellectual, self-possessed in personality and
consciousness. When the Egyptian priest said to Solon, 'You Greeks are
always children,' he intended a gentle sarcasm, but he implied a
compliment; for the quality of imperishable youth belonged to the
Hellenic spirit, and has become the heritage of every race which
partook of it. And this spirit in no common degree has been shared by
the Italians of the earlier and the later classic epoch. The land is full of
monuments pertaining to those two brilliant periods; and whenever the
voice of poet has spoken or the hand of artist has been at work, that
spirit, as distinguished from the spirit of mediaevalism, has found
expression.
Yet it must be remembered that during the five centuries above
mentioned Italy was given over to Lombards, Franks, and Germans.
Feudal institutions, alien to the social and political ideals of the classic
world, took a tolerably firm hold on the country. The Latin element
remained silent, passive, in abeyance, undergoing an important
transformation. It was in the course of those five hundred years that the
Italians as a modern people, separable from their Roman ancestors,
were formed. At the close of this obscure passage in Italian history,
their communes, the foundation of Italy's future independence, and the
source of her peculiar national development, appeared in all the vigour
and audacity of youth. At its close the Italian genius presented Europe
with its greatest triumph of constructive ability, the Papacy. At its close
again the series of supreme artistic achievements, starting with the
architecture of churches and public palaces, passing on to sculpture and
painting, and culminating in music, which only ended with the
temporary extinction of national vitality in the seventeenth century, was
simultaneously begun in all the provinces of the peninsula.
So important were these five centuries of incubation for Italy, and so
little is there left of them to arrest the attention of the student, dazzled
as he is by the ever-living glories of Greece, Rome, and the
Renaissance, that a visit to the ruins of Canossa is almost a duty. There,
in spite of himself, by the very isolation and forlorn abandonment of
what was once so formidable a seat of feudal despotism and
ecclesiastical tyranny, he is forced to confront the obscure but mighty
spirit of the middle ages. There, if anywhere, the men of those
iron-hearted times anterior to the Crusades will acquire distinctness for
his imagination, when he recalls the three main actors in the drama
enacted on the summit of Canossa's rock in the bitter winter of 1077.
Canossa lies almost due south of Reggio d'Emilia, upon the slopes of
the Apennines. Starting from Reggio, the carriage-road keeps to the
plain for some while in a westerly direction, and then bends away
towards the mountains. As we approach their spurs, the ground begins
to rise. The rich Lombard tilth of maize and vine gives place to
English-looking hedgerows, lined with oaks, and studded with
handsome dark tufts of green hellebore. The hills descend in
melancholy earth-heaps on the plain, crowned here and there with
ruined castles. Four of these mediaeval strongholds, called Bianello,
Montevetro, Monteluzzo, and Montezano, give the name of Quattro
Castelli to the commune. The most important of them, Bianello, which,
next to Canossa, was the strongest fortress possessed by the Countess
Matilda and her ancestors, still presents a considerable mass of
masonry, roofed and habitable. The group formed a kind of
advance-guard for Canossa against attack from Lombardy. After
passing Quattro Castelli we enter the hills, climbing gently upwards
between barren slopes of ashy grey earth--the débris of most ancient
Apennines--crested at favourable points with lonely towers. In truth the
whole country bristles with ruined forts, making it clear that during the
middle ages Canossa was but the centre of a great military system, the
core and kernel of a fortified position which covered an area to be
measured by scores of square miles, reaching far into the mountains,
and buttressed on the plain. As yet, however, after nearly two hours'
driving, Canossa has not come in sight. At last a turn in the road
discloses an opening in the valley of the Enza to the left: up this lateral
gorge we see first the Castle of Rossena on its knoll of solid red rock,
flaming in the sunlight; and then, further withdrawn, detached from all
surrounding objects, and reared aloft as though to sweep the sea of
waved and broken hills around it, a sharp horn of hard white stone.
That is Canossa--the alba Canossa, the candida petra of its rhyming
chronicler. There is no mistaking the commanding value of its situation.
At the same time the brilliant whiteness of Canossa's rocky hill,
contrasted with the red gleam of Rossena, and outlined against the
prevailing dulness of these earthy Apennines, secures a picturesque
individuality concordant with its unique history and unrivalled strength.
There is still a journey of two hours before the castle can be reached:
and this may be performed on foot or horseback. The path winds
upward over broken ground; following the arête of curiously jumbled
and thwarted hill-slopes; passing beneath the battlements of Rossena,
whence the unfortunate Everelina threw herself in order to escape the
savage love of her lord and jailor; and then skirting those horrid earthen
balze which are so common and so unattractive a feature of Apennine
scenery. The most hideous balze to be found in the length and breadth
of Italy are probably those of Volterra, from which the citizens
themselves recoil with a kind of terror, and which lure melancholy men
by intolerable fascination on to suicide. For ever crumbling, altering
with frost and rain, discharging gloomy glaciers of slow-crawling mud,
and scarring the hillside with tracts of barrenness, these
earth-precipices are among the most ruinous and discomfortable
failures of nature. They have not even so much of wildness or grandeur
as forms, the saving merit of nearly all wasteful things in the world,
and can only be classed with the desolate ghiare of Italian river-beds.
Such as they are, these balze form an appropriate preface to the gloomy
and repellent isolation of Canossa. The rock towers from a narrow
platform to the height of rather more than 160 feet from its base. The
top is fairly level, forming an irregular triangle, of which the greatest
length is about 260 feet, and the width about 100 feet. Scarcely a
vestige of any building can be traced either upon the platform or the
summit, with the exception of a broken wall and windows supposed to
belong to the end of the sixteenth century. The ancient castle, with its
triple circuit of walls, enclosing barracks for the garrison, lodgings for
the lord and his retainers, a stately church, a sumptuous monastery,
storehouses, stables, workshops, and all the various buildings of a
fortified stronghold, have utterly disappeared. The very passage of
approach cannot be ascertained; for it is doubtful whether the present
irregular path that scales the western face of the rock be really the
remains of some old staircase, corresponding to that by which Mont S.
Michel in Normandy is ascended. One thing is tolerably certain--that
the three walls of which we hear so much from the chroniclers, and
which played so picturesque a part in the drama of Henry IV.'s penance,
surrounded the cliff at its base, and embraced a large acreage of ground.
The citadel itself must have been but the acropolis or keep of an
extensive fortress.
There has been plenty of time since the year 1255, when the people of
Reggio sacked and destroyed Canossa, for Nature to resume her
undisputed sway by obliterating the handiwork of men; and at present
Nature forms the chief charm of Canossa. Lying one afternoon of May
on the crisp short grass at the edge of a precipice purple with iris in full
blossom, I surveyed, from what were once the battlements of Matilda's
castle, a prospect than which there is none more spirit-stirring by
reason of its beauty and its manifold associations in Europe. The lower
castle-crowded hills have sunk. Reggio lies at our feet, shut in between
the crests of Monte Carboniano and Monte delle Celle. Beyond Reggio
stretches Lombardy--the fairest and most memorable battlefield of
nations, the richest and most highly cultivated garden of civilised
industry. Nearly all the Lombard cities may be seen, some of them faint
like bluish films of vapour, some clear with dome and spire. There is
Modena and her Ghirlandina. Carpi, Parma, Mirandola, Verona,
Mantua, lie well defined and russet on the flat green map; and there
flashes a bend of lordly Po; and there the Euganeans rise like islands,
telling us where Padua and Ferrara nestle in the amethystine haze
Beyond and above all to the northward sweep the Alps, tossing their
silvery crests up into the cloudless sky from the violet mist that girds
their flanks and drowns their basements. Monte Adamello and the
Ortler, the cleft of the Brenner, and the sharp peaks of the Venetian
Alps are all distinctly visible. An eagle flying straight from our eyrie
might traverse Lombardy and light among the snow-fields of the
Valtelline between sunrise and sundown. Nor is the prospect tame to
southward. Here the Apennines roll, billow above billow, in majestic
desolation, soaring to snow summits in the Pellegrino region. As our
eye attempts to thread that labyrinth of hill and vale, we tell ourselves
that those roads wind to Tuscany, and yonder stretches Garfagnana,
where Ariosto lived and mused in honourable exile from the world he
loved.
It was by one of the mountain passes that lead from Lucca northward
that the first founder of Canossa is said to have travelled early in the
tenth century. Sigifredo, if the tradition may be trusted, was very
wealthy; and with his money he bought lands and signorial rights at
Reggio, bequeathing to his children, when he died about 945, a
patrimony which they developed into a petty kingdom. Azzo, his
second son, fortified Canossa, and made it his principal place of
residence. When Lothair, King of Italy, died in 950, leaving his
beautiful widow to the ill-treatment of his successor, Berenger,
Adelaide found a protector in this Azzo. She had been imprisoned on
the Lake of Garda; but managing to escape in man's clothes to Mantua,
she thence sent news of her misfortunes to Canossa. Azzo lost no time
in riding with his knights to her relief, and brought her back in safety to
his mountain fastness. It is related that Azzo was afterwards
instrumental in calling Otho into Italy and procuring his marriage with
Adelaide, in consequence of which events Italy became a fief of the
Empire. Owing to the part he played at this time, the Lord of Canossa
was recognised as one of the most powerful vassals of the German
Emperor in Lombardy. Honours were heaped upon him; and he grew so
rich and formidable that Berenger, the titular King of Italy, laid siege to
his fortress of Canossa. The memory of this siege, which lasted for
three years and a half, is said still to linger in the popular traditions of
the place. When Azzo died at the end of the tenth century, he left to his
son Tedaldo the title of Count of Reggio and Modena; and this title was
soon after raised to that of Marquis. The Marches governed as Vicar of
the Empire by Tedaldo included Reggio, Modena, Ferrara, Brescia, and
probably Mantua. They stretched, in fact, across the north of Italy,
forming a quadrilateral between the Alps and Apennines. Like his
father, Tedaldo adhered consistently to the Imperial party; and when he
died and was buried at Canossa, he in his turn bequeathed to his son
Bonifazio a power and jurisdiction increased by his own abilities.
Bonifazio held the state of a sovereign at Canossa, adding the duchy of
Tuscany to his father's fiefs, and meeting the allied forces of the
Lombard barons in the field of Coviolo like an independent potentate.
His power and splendour were great enough to rouse the jealousy of the
Emperor; but Henry III. seems to have thought it more prudent to
propitiate this proud vassal, and to secure his kindness, than to attempt
his humiliation. Bonifazio married Beatrice, daughter of Frederick,
Duke of Lorraine--her whose marble sarcophagus in the Campo Santo
at Pisa is said to have inspired Niccola Pisano with his new style of
sculpture. Their only child, Matilda, was born, probably at Lucca, in
1046; and six years after her birth, Bonifazio, who had swayed his
subjects like an iron-handed tyrant, was murdered. To the great House
of Canossa, the rulers of one-third of Italy, there now remained only
two women, Bonifazio's widow Beatrice, and his daughter Matilda.
Beatrice married Godfrey, Duke of Lorraine, who was recognised by
Henry IV. as her husband and as feudatory of the Empire in the full
place of Boniface. He died about 1070; and in this year Matilda was
married by proxy to his son, Godfrey the Hunchback, whom, however,
she did not see till the year 1072. The marriage was not a happy one;
and the question has even been disputed among Matilda's biographers
whether it was ever consummated. At any rate it did not last long; for
Godfrey was killed at Antwerp in 1076. In this year Matilda also lost
her mother, Beatrice, who died at Pisa, and was buried in the cathedral.
By this rapid enumeration of events it will be seen how the power and
honours of the House of Canossa, including Tuscany, Spoleto, and the
fairest portions of Lombardy, had devolved upon a single woman of the
age of thirty at the moment when the fierce quarrel between Pope and
Emperor began in the year 1076. Matilda was destined to play a great, a
striking, and a tragic part in the opening drama of Italian history. Her
decided character and uncompromising course of action have won for
her the name of 'la gran donna d'Italia,' and have caused her memory to
be blessed or execrated, according as the temporal pretensions and
spiritual tyranny of the Papacy may have found supporters or
opponents in posterity. She was reared from childhood in habits of
austerity and unquestioning piety. Submission to the Church became
for her not merely a rule of conduct, but a passionate enthusiasm. She
identified herself with the cause of four successive Popes, protected her
idol, the terrible and iron-hearted Hildebrand, in the time of his
adversity; remained faithful to his principles after his death; and having
served the Holy See with all her force and all that she possessed
through all her lifetime, she bequeathed her vast dominions to it on her
deathbed. Like some of the greatest mediaeval characters--like
Hildebrand himself--Matilda was so thoroughly of one piece, that she
towers above the mists of ages with the massive grandeur of an
incarnated idea. She is for us the living statue of a single thought, an
undivided impulse, the more than woman born to represent her age.
Nor was it without reason that Dante symbolised in her the love of
Holy Church; though students of the 'Purgatory' will hardly recognise
the lovely maiden, singing and plucking flowers beside the stream of
Lethe, in the stern and warlike chatelaine of Canossa. Unfortunately we
know but little of Matilda's personal appearance. Her health was not
strong; and it is said to have been weakened, especially in her last
illness, by ascetic observances. Yet she headed her own troops, armed
with sword and cuirass, avoiding neither peril nor fatigue in the
quarrels of her master Gregory. Up to the year 1622 two strong suits of
mail were preserved at Quattro Castelli, which were said to have been
worn by her in battle, and which were afterwards sold on the
market-place at Reggio. This habit of donning armour does not,
however, prove that Matilda was exceptionally vigorous; for in those
savage times she could hardly have played the part of heroine without
participating personally in the dangers of warfare.
No less monumental in the plastic unity of his character was the monk
Hildebrand, who for twenty years before his elevation to the Papacy
had been the maker of Popes and the creator of the policy of Rome.
When he was himself elected in the year 1073, and had assumed the
name of Gregory VII., he immediately began to put in practice the
plans for Church aggrandisement he had slowly matured during the
previous quarter of a century. To free the Church from its subservience
to the Empire, to assert the Pope's right to ratify the election of the
Emperor and to exercise the right of jurisdiction over him, to place
ecclesiastical appointments in the sole power of the Roman See, and to
render the celibacy of the clergy obligatory, were the points he had
resolved to carry. Taken singly and together, these chief aims of
Hildebrand's policy had but one object--the magnification of the
Church at the expense both of the people and of secular authorities, and
the further separation of the Church from the ties and sympathies of
common life that bound it to humanity. To accuse Hildebrand of
personal ambition would be but shallow criticism, though it is clear that
his inflexible and puissant nature found a savage selfish pleasure in
trampling upon power and humbling pride at warfare with his own. Yet
his was in no sense an egotistic purpose like that which moved the
Popes of the Renaissance to dismember Italy for their bastards.
Hildebrand, like Matilda, was himself the creature of a great idea.
These two potent personalities completely understood each other, and
worked towards a single end. Tho mythopoeic fancy might conceive of
them as the male and female manifestations of one dominant faculty,
the spirit of ecclesiastical dominion incarnate in a man and woman of
almost super-human mould.
Opposed to them, as the third actor in the drama of Canossa, was a man
of feebler mould. Henry IV., King of Italy, but not yet crowned
Emperor, had none of his opponents' unity of purpose or monumental
dignity of character. At war with his German feudatories, browbeaten
by rebellious sons, unfaithful and cruel to his wife, vacillating in the
measures he adopted to meet his divers difficulties, at one time
tormented by his conscience into cowardly submission, and at another
treasonably neglectful of the most solemn obligations, Henry was no
match for the stern wills against which he was destined to break in
unavailing passion. Early disagreements with Gregory had culminated
in his excommunication. The German nobles abandoned his cause; and
Henry found it expedient to summon a council in Augsburg for the
settlement of matters in dispute between the Empire and the Papacy.
Gregory expressed his willingness to attend this council, and set forth
from Rome accompanied by the Countess Matilda in December 1076.
He did not, however, travel further than Vercelli, for news here reached
him that Henry was about to enter Italy at the head of a powerful army.
Matilda hereupon persuaded the Holy Father to place himself in safety
among her strongholds of Canossa. Thither accordingly Gregory retired
before the ending of that year; and bitter were the sarcasms uttered by
the imperial partisans in Italy upon this protection offered by a fair
countess to the monk who had been made a Pope. The foul calumnies
of that bygone age would be unworthy of even so much as this notice,
if we did not trace in them the ineradicable Italian tendency to cynical
insinuation--a tendency which has involved the history of the
Renaissance Popes in an almost impenetrable mist of lies and
exaggerations. Henry was in truth upon his road to Italy, but with a
very different attendance from that which Gregory expected.
Accompanied by Bertha, his wife, and his boy son Conrad, the
Emperor elect left Spires in the condition of a fugitive, crossed
Burgundy, spent Christmas at Besançon, and journeyed to the foot of
Mont Cenis. It is said that he was followed by a single male servant of
mean birth; and if the tale of his adventures during the passage of the
Alps can be credited, history presents fewer spectacles more
picturesque than the straits to which this representative of the Cæsars,
this supreme chief of feudal civility, this ruler destined still to be the
leader of mighty armies and the father of a line of monarchs, was
exposed. Concealing his real name and state, he induced some
shepherds to lead him and his escort through the thick snows to the
summit of Mont Cenis; and by the help of these men the imperial party
were afterwards let down the snow-slopes on the further side by means
of ropes. Bertha and her women were sewn up in hides and dragged
across the frozen surface of the winter drifts. It was a year memorable
for its severity. Heavy snow had fallen in October, which continued
ice-bound and unyielding till the following April.
No sooner had Henry reached Turin, than he set forward again in the
direction of Canossa. The fame of his arrival had preceded him, and he
found that his party was far stronger in Italy than he had ventured to
expect. Proximity to the Church of Rome divests its fulminations of
half their terrors. The Italian bishops and barons, less superstitious than
the Germans, and with greater reason to resent the domineering
graspingness of Gregory, were ready to espouse the Emperor's cause.
Henry gathered a formidable force as he marched onward across
Lombardy; and some of the most illustrious prelates and nobles of the
South were in his suite. A more determined leader than Henry proved
himself to be, might possibly have forced Gregory to some
accommodation, in spite of the strength of Canossa and the Pope's
invincible obstinacy, by proper use of these supporters. Meanwhile the
adherents of the Church were mustered in Matilda's fortress; among
whom may be mentioned Azzo, the progenitor of Este and Brunswick;
Hugh, Abbot of Clugny; and the princely family of Piedmont. 'I am
become a second Rome,' exclaims Canossa, in the language of
Matilda's rhyming chronicler; 'all honours are mine; I hold at once both
Pope and King, the princes of Italy and those of Gaul, those of Rome,
and those from far beyond the Alps.' The stage was ready; the audience
had assembled; and now the three great actors were about to meet.
Immediately upon his arrival at Canossa, Henry sent for his cousin, the
Countess Matilda, and besought her to intercede for him with Gregory.
He was prepared to make any concessions or to undergo any
humiliations, if only the ban of excommunication might be removed;
nor, cowed as he was by his own superstitious conscience, and by the
memory of the opposition he had met with from his German vassals,
does he seem to have once thought of meeting force with force, and of
returning to his northern kingdom triumphant in the overthrow of
Gregory's pride. Matilda undertook to plead his cause before the Pontiff.
But Gregory was not to be moved so soon to mercy. 'If Henry has in
truth repented,' he replied, 'let him lay down crown and sceptre, and
declare himself unworthy of the name of king.' The only point
conceded to the suppliant was that he should be admitted in the garb of
a penitent within the precincts of the castle. Leaving his retinue outside
the walls, Henry entered the first series of outworks, and was thence
conducted to the second, so that between him and the citadel itself there
still remained the third of the surrounding bastions. Here he was bidden
to wait the Pope's pleasure; and here, in the midst of that bitter winter
weather, while the fierce winds of the Apennines were sweeping sleet
upon him in their passage from Monte Pellegrino to the plain, he knelt
barefoot, clothed in sackcloth, fasting from dawn till eve, for three
whole days. On the morning of the fourth day, judging that Gregory
was inexorable, and that his suit would not be granted, Henry retired to
the Chapel of S. Nicholas, which stood within this second precinct.
There he called to his aid the Abbot of Clugny and the Countess, both
of whom were his relations, and who, much as they might sympathise
with Gregory, could hardly be supposed to look with satisfaction on
their royal kinsman's outrage. The Abbot told Henry that nothing in the
world could move the Pope; but Matilda, when in turn he fell before
her knees and wept, engaged to do for him the utmost. She probably
knew that the moment for unbending had arrived, and that her
imperious guest could not with either decency or prudence prolong the
outrage offered to the civil chief of Christendom. It was the 25th of
January when the Emperor elect was brought, half dead with cold and
misery, into the Pope's presence. There he prostrated himself in the dust,
crying aloud for pardon. It is said that Gregory first placed his foot
upon Henry's neck, uttering these words of Scripture: 'Super aspidem et
basiliscum ambulabis, et conculcabis leonem et draconem,' and that
then he raised him from the earth and formally pronounced his pardon.
The prelates and nobles who took part in this scene were compelled to
guarantee with their own oaths the vows of obedience pronounced by
Henry; so that in the very act of reconciliation a new insult was offered
to him. After this Gregory said mass, and permitted Henry to
communicate; and at the close of the day a banquet was served, at
which the King sat down to meat with the Pope and the Countess.
It is probable that, while Henry's penance was performed in the castle
courts beneath the rock, his reception by the Pope, and all that
subsequently happened, took place in the citadel itself. But of this we
have no positive information. Indeed the silence of the chronicles as to
the topography of Canossa is peculiarly unfortunate for lovers of the
picturesque in historic detail, now that there is no possibility of tracing
the outlines of the ancient building. Had the author of the 'Vita
Mathildis' (Muratori, vol. v.) foreseen that his beloved Canossa would
one day be nothing but a mass of native rock, he would undoubtedly
have been more explicit on these points; and much that is vague about
an event only paralleled by our Henry II.'s penance before Becket's
shrine at Canterbury, might now be clear.
Very little remains to be told about Canossa. During the same year,
1077, Matilda made the celebrated donation of her fiefs to Holy Church.
This was accepted by Gregory in the name of S. Peter, and it was
confirmed by a second deed during the pontificate of Urban IV. in 1102.
Though Matilda subsequently married Guelfo d'Este, son of the Duke
of Bavaria, she was speedily divorced from him; nor was there any heir
to a marriage ridiculous by reason of disparity of age, the bridegroom
being but eighteen, while the bride was forty-three in the year of her
second nuptials. During one of Henry's descents into Italy, he made an
unsuccessful attack upon Canossa, assailing it at the head of a
considerable force one October morning in 1092. Matilda's biographer
informs us that the mists of autumn veiled his beloved fortress from the
eyes of the beleaguerers. They had not even the satisfaction of
beholding the unvanquished citadel; and, what was more, the banner of
the Emperor was seized and dedicated as a trophy in the Church of S.
Apollonio. In the following year the Countess opened her gates of
Canossa to an illustrious fugitive, Adelaide, the wife of her old foeman,
Henry, who had escaped with difficulty from the insults and the cruelty
of her husband. After Henry's death, his son, the Emperor Henry V.,
paid Matilda a visit in her castle of Bianello, addressed her by the name
of mother, and conferred upon her the vice-regency of Liguria. At the
age of sixty-nine she died, in 1115, at Bondeno de' Roncori, and was
buried, not among her kinsmen at Canossa, but in an abbey of S.
Benedict near Mantua. With her expired the main line of the noble
house she represented; though Canossa, now made a fief of the Empire
in spite of Matilda's donation, was given to a family which claimed
descent from Bonifazio's brother Conrad--a young man killed in the
battle of Coviolo. This family, in its turn, was extinguished in the year
1570; but a junior branch still exists at Verona. It will be remembered
that Michelangelo Buonarroti claimed kinship with the Count of
Canossa; and a letter from the Count is extant acknowledging the
validity of his pretension.
As far back as 1255 the people of Reggio destroyed the castle; nor did
the nobles of Canossa distinguish themselves in subsequent history
among those families who based their despotisms on the débris of the
Imperial power in Lombardy. It seemed destined that Canossa and all
belonging to it should remain as a mere name and memory of the
outgrown middle ages. Estensi, Carraresi, Visconti, Bentivogli, and
Gonzaghi belong to a later period of Lombard history, and mark the
dawn of the Renaissance.
As I lay and mused that afternoon of May upon the short grass, cropped
by two grey goats, whom a little boy was tending, it occurred to me to
ask the woman who had served me as guide, whether any legend
remained in the country concerning the Countess Matilda. She had
often, probably, been asked this question by other travellers. Therefore
she was more than usually ready with an answer, which, as far as I
could understand her dialect, was this. Matilda was a great and potent
witch, whose summons the devil was bound to obey. One day she
aspired, alone of all her sex, to say mass; but when the moment came
for sacring the elements, a thunderbolt fell from the clear sky, and
reduced her to ashes.[12] That the most single-hearted handmaid of the
Holy Church, whose life was one long devotion to its ordinances,
should survive in this grotesque myth, might serve to point a satire
upon the vanity of earthly fame. The legend in its very extravagance is
a fanciful distortion of the truth.
*****
FORNOVO
In the town of Parma there is one surpassingly strange relic of the past.
The palace of the Farnesi, like many a haunt of upstart tyranny and
beggared pride on these Italian plains, rises misshapen and disconsolate
above the stream that bears the city's name. The squalor of this
grey-brown edifice of formless brick, left naked like the palace of the
same Farnesi at Piacenza, has something even horrid in it now that only
vague memory survives of its former uses. The princely sprezzatura of
its ancient occupants, careless of these unfinished courts and unroofed
galleries amid the splendour of their purfled silks and the glitter of their
torchlight pageantry, has yielded to sullen cynicism--the cynicism of
arrested ruin and unreverend age. All that was satisfying to the senses
and distracting to the eyesight in their transitory pomp has passed away,
leaving a sinister and naked shell. Remembrance can but summon up
the crimes, the madness, the trivialities of those dead palace-builders.
An atmosphere of evil clings to the dilapidated walls, as though the
tainted spirit of the infamous Pier Luigi still possessed the spot, on
which his toadstool brood of princelings sprouted in the mud of their
misdeeds. Enclosed in this huge labyrinth of brickwork is the relic of
which I spoke. It is the once world-famous Teatro Farnese, raised in the
year 1618 by Ranunzio Farnese for the marriage of Odoardo Farnese
with Margaret of Austria. Giambattista Aleotti, a native of
pageant-loving Ferrara, traced the stately curves and noble orders of the
galleries, designed the columns that support the raftered roof, marked
out the orchestra, arranged the stage, and breathed into the whole the
spirit of Palladio's most heroic neo-Latin style. Vast, built of wood,
dishevelled, with broken statues and blurred coats of arms, with its
empty scene, its uncurling frescoes, its hangings all in rags, its cobwebs
of two centuries, its dust and mildew and discoloured gold--this theatre,
a sham in its best days, and now that ugliest of things, a sham
unmasked and naked to the light of day, is yet sublime, because of its
proportioned harmony, because of its grand Roman manner. The sight
and feeling of it fasten upon the mind and abide in the memory like a
nightmare,--like one of Piranesi's weirdest and most passion-haunted
etchings for the Carceri. Idling there at noon in the twilight of the
dust-bedarkened windows, we fill the tiers of those high galleries with
ladies, the space below with grooms and pages; the stage is ablaze with
torches, and an Italian Masque, such as our Marlowe dreamed of, fills
the scene. But it is impossible to dower these fancies with even such
life as in healthier, happier ruins phantasy may lend to imagination's
figments. This theatre is like a maniac's skull, empty of all but
unrealities and mockeries of things that are. The ghosts we raise here
could never have been living men and women: questi sciaurati non fur
mai vivi. So clinging is the sense of instability that appertains to every
fragment of that dry-rot tyranny which seized by evil fortune in the
sunset of her golden day on Italy.
In this theatre I mused one morning after visiting Fornovo; and the
thoughts suggested by the battlefield found their proper atmosphere in
the dilapidated place. What, indeed, is the Teatro Farnese but a symbol
of those hollow principalities which the despot and the stranger built in
Italy after the fatal date of 1494, when national enthusiasm and political
energy were expiring in a blaze of art, and when the Italians as a people
had ceased to be; but when the phantom of their former life, surviving
in high works of beauty, was still superb by reason of imperishable
style! How much in Italy of the Renaissance was, like this plank-built
plastered theatre, a glorious sham! The sham was seen through then;
and now it stands unmasked: and yet, strange to say, so perfect is its
form that we respect the sham and yield our spirits to the incantation of
its music.
The battle of Fornovo, as modern battles go, was a paltry affair; and
even at the time it seemed sufficiently without result. Yet the trumpets
which rang on July 6, 1495, for the onset, sounded the réveil of the
modern world; and in the inconclusive termination of the struggle of
that day, the Italians were already judged and sentenced as a nation.
The armies who met that morning represented Italy and France,--Italy,
the Sibyl of Renaissance; France, the Sibyl of Revolution. At the fall of
evening Europe was already looking northward; and the last years of
the fifteenth century were opening an act which closed in blood at Paris
on the ending of the eighteenth.
If it were not for thoughts like these, no one, I suppose, would take the
trouble to drive for two hours out of Parma to the little village of
Fornovo--a score of bare grey hovels on the margin of a pebbly
river-bed beneath the Apennines. The fields on either side, as far as eye
can see, are beautiful indeed in May sunlight, painted here with flax,
like shallow sheets of water reflecting a pale sky, and there with clover
red as blood. Scarce unfolded leaves sparkle like flamelets of bright
green upon the knotted vines, and the young corn is bending all one
way beneath a western breeze. But not less beautiful than this is the
whole broad plain of Lombardy; nor are the nightingales louder here
than in the acacia trees around Pavia. As we drive, the fields become
less fertile, and the hills encroach upon the level, sending down their
spurs upon that waveless plain like blunt rocks jutting out into a
tranquil sea. When we reach the bed of the Taro, these hills begin to
narrow on either hand, and the road rises. Soon they open out again
with gradual curving lines, forming a kind of amphitheatre filled up
from flank to flank with the ghiara or pebbly bottom of the Taro. The
Taro is not less wasteful than any other of the brotherhood of streams
that pour from Alp or Apennine to swell the Po. It wanders, an
impatient rivulet, through a wilderness of boulders, uncertain of its aim,
shifting its course with the season of the year, unless the jaws of some
deep-cloven gully hold it tight and show how insignificant it is. As we
advance, the hills approach again; between their skirts there is nothing
but the river-bed; and now on rising ground above the stream, at the
point of juncture between the Ceno and the Taro, we find Fornovo.
Beyond the village the valley broadens out once more, disclosing
Apennines capped with winter snow. To the right descends the Ceno.
To the left foams the Taro, following whose rocky channel we should
come at last to Pontremoli and the Tyrrhenian sea beside Sarzana. On a
May-day of sunshine like the present, the Taro is a gentle stream. A
waggon drawn by two white oxen has just entered its channel, guided
by a contadino with goat-skin leggings, wielding a long goad. The
patient creatures stem the water, which rises to the peasant's thighs and
ripples round the creaking wheels. Swaying to and fro, as the shingles
shift upon the river-bed, they make their way across; and now they
have emerged upon the stones; and now we lose them in a flood of
sunlight.
It was by this pass that Charles VIII. in 1495 returned from Tuscany,
when the army of the League was drawn up waiting to intercept and
crush him in the mousetrap of Fornovo. No road remained for Charles
and his troops but the rocky bed of the Taro, running, as I have
described it, between the spurs of steep hills. It is true that the valley of
the Baganza leads, from a little higher up among the mountains, into
Lombardy. But this pass runs straight to Parma; and to follow it would
have brought the French upon the walls of a strong city. Charles could
not do otherwise than descend upon the village of Fornovo, and cut his
way thence in the teeth of the Italian army over stream and boulder
between the gorges of throttling mountain. The failure of the Italians to
achieve what here upon the ground appears so simple, delivered Italy
hand-bound to strangers. Had they but succeeded in arresting Charles
and destroying his forces at Fornovo, it is just possible that then--even
then, at the eleventh hour--Italy might have gained the sense of national
coherence, or at least have proved herself capable of holding by her
leagues the foreigner at bay. As it was, the battle of Fornovo, in spite of
Venetian bonfires and Mantuan Madonnas of Victory, made her
conscious of incompetence and convicted her of cowardice. After
Fornovo, her sons scarcely dared to hold their heads up in the field
against invaders; and the battles fought upon her soil were duels among
aliens for the prize of Italy.
In order to comprehend the battle of Fornovo in its bearings on Italian
history, we must go back to the year 1492, and understand the
conditions of the various States of Italy at that date. On April 8 in that
year, Lorenzo de' Medici, who had succeeded in maintaining a political
equilibrium in the peninsula, expired, and was succeeded by his son
Piero, a vain and foolhardy young man, from whom no guidance could
be expected. On July 25, Innocent VIII. died, and was succeeded by the
very worst Pope who has ever occupied S. Peter's chair, Roderigo
Borgia, Alexander VI. It was felt at once that the old order of things
had somehow ended, and that a new era, the destinies of which as yet
remained incalculable, was opening for Italy. The chief Italian powers,
hitherto kept in equipoise by the diplomacy of Lorenzo de' Medici,
were these--the Duchy of Milan, the Republic of Venice, the Republic
of Florence, the Papacy, and the kingdom of Naples. Minor States, such
as the Republics of Genoa and Siena, the Duchies of Urbino and
Ferrara, the Marquisate of Mantua, the petty tyrannies of Romagna, and
the wealthy city of Bologna, were sufficiently important to affect the
balance of power, and to produce new combinations. For the present
purpose it is, however, enough to consider the five great Powers.
After the peace of Constance, which freed the Lombard Communes
from Imperial interference in the year 1183, Milan, by her geographical
position, rose rapidly to be the first city of North Italy. Without
narrating the changes by which she lost her freedom as a Commune, it
is enough to state that, earliest of all Italian cities, Milan passed into the
hands of a single family. The Visconti managed to convert this
flourishing commonwealth, with all its dependencies, into their private
property, ruling it exclusively for their own profit, using its municipal
institutions as the machinery of administration, and employing the
taxes which they raised upon its wealth for purely selfish ends. When
the line of the Visconti ended in the year 1447, their tyranny was
continued by Francesco Sforza, the son of a poor soldier of adventure,
who had raised himself by his military genius, and had married Bianca,
the illegitimate daughter of the last Visconti. On the death of Francesco
Sforza in 1466, he left two sons, Galeazzo Maria and Lodovico,
surnamed Il Moro, both of whom were destined to play a prominent
part in history. Galeazzo Maria, dissolute, vicious, and cruel to the core,
was murdered by his injured subjects in the year 1476. His son,
Giovanni Galeazzo, aged eight, would in course of time have
succeeded to the Duchy, had it not been for the ambition of his uncle
Lodovico. Lodovico contrived to name himself as Regent for his
nephew, whom he kept, long after he had come of age, in a kind of
honourable prison. Virtual master in Milan, but without a legal title to
the throne, unrecognised in his authority by the Italian powers, and
holding it from day to day by craft and fraud, Lodovico at last found
his situation untenable; and it was this difficulty of an usurper to
maintain himself in his despotism which, as we shall see, brought the
French into Italy.
Venice, the neighbour and constant foe of Milan, had become a close
oligarchy by a process of gradual constitutional development, which
threw her government into the hands of a few nobles. She was
practically ruled by the hereditary members of the Grand Council. Ever
since the year 1453, when Constantinople fell beneath the Turk, the
Venetians had been more and more straitened in their Oriental
commerce, and were thrown back upon the policy of territorial
aggrandisement in Italy, from which they had hitherto refrained as alien
to the temperament of the Republic. At the end of the fifteenth century
Venice therefore became an object of envy and terror to the Italian
States. They envied her because she alone was tranquil, wealthy,
powerful, and free. They feared her because they had good reason to
suspect her of encroachment; and it was foreseen that if she got the
upper hand in Italy, all Italy would be the property of the families
inscribed upon the Golden Book. It was thus alone that the Italians
comprehended government. The principle of representation being
utterly unknown, and the privileged burghers in each city being
regarded as absolute and lawful owners of the city and of everything
belonging to it, the conquest of a town by a republic implied the
political extinction of that town and the disfranchisement of its
inhabitants in favour of the conquerors.
Florence at this epoch still called itself a Republic; and of all Italian
commonwealths it was by far the most democratic. Its history, unlike
that of Venice, had been the history of continual and brusque changes,
resulting in the destruction of the old nobility, in the equalisation of the
burghers, and in the formation of a new aristocracy of wealth. Prom
this class of bourgeois nobles sprang the Medici, who, by careful
manipulation of the State machinery, by the creation of a powerful
party devoted to their interests, by flattery of the people, by corruption,
by taxation, and by constant scheming, raised themselves to the first
place in the commonwealth, and became its virtual masters. In the year
1492 Lorenzo de' Medici, the most remarkable chief of this despotic
family, died, bequeathing his supremacy in the Republic to a son of
marked incompetence.
Since the Pontificate of Nicholas V. the See of Rome had entered upon
a new period of existence. The Popes no longer dreaded to reside in
Rome, but were bent upon making the metropolis of Christendom both
splendid as a seat of art and learning, and also potent as the capital of a
secular kingdom. Though their fiefs in Romagna and the March were
still held but loosely, though their provinces swarmed with petty
despots who defied the Papal authority, and though the princely Roman
houses of Colonna and Orsini were still strong enough to terrorise the
Holy Father in the Vatican, it was now clear that the Papal See must in
the end get the better of its adversaries, and consolidate itself into a
first-rate Power. The internal spirit of the Papacy at this time
corresponded to its external policy. It was thoroughly secularised by a
series of worldly and vicious pontiffs, who had clean forgotten what
their title, Vicar of Christ, implied. They consistently used their
religious prestige to enforce their secular authority, while by their
temporal power they caused their religious claims to be respected.
Corrupt and shameless, they indulged themselves in every vice, openly
acknowledged their children, and turned Italy upside down in order to
establish favourites and bastards in the principalities they seized as
spoils of war.
The kingdom of Naples differed from any other state of Italy. Subject
continually to foreign rulers since the decay of the Greek Empire,
governed in succession by the Normans, the Hohenstauffens, and the
House of Anjou, it had never enjoyed the real independence, or the free
institutions, of the northern provinces; nor had it been Italianised in the
same sense as the rest of the peninsula. Despotism, which assumed so
many forms in Italy, was here neither the tyranny of a noble house, nor
the masked autocracy of a burgher, nor yet the forceful sway of a
condottiere. It had a dynastic character, resembling the monarchy of
one of the great European nations, but modified by the peculiar
conditions of Italian statecraft. Owing to this dynastic and monarchical
complexion of the Neapolitan kingdom, semi-feudal customs flourished
in the south far more than in the north of Italy. The barons were more
powerful; and the destinies of the Regno often turned upon their feuds
and quarrels with the Crown. At the same time the Neapolitan despots
shared the uneasy circumstances of all Italian potentates, owing to the
uncertainty of their tenure, both as conquerors and aliens, and also as
the nominal vassals of the Holy See. The rights of suzerainty which the
Normans had yielded to the Papacy over their southern conquests, and
which the Popes had arbitrarily exercised in favour of the Angevine
princes, proved a constant source of peril to the rest of Italy by
rendering the succession to the crown of Naples doubtful. On the
extinction of the Angevine line, however, the throne was occupied by a
prince who had no valid title but that of the sword to its possession.
Alfonso of Aragon conquered Naples in 1442, and neglecting his
hereditary dominion, settled in his Italian capital. Possessed with the
enthusiasm for literature which was then the ruling passion of the
Italians, and very liberal to men of learning, Alfonso won for himself
the surname of Magnanimous. On his death, in 1458, he bequeathed his
Spanish kingdom, together with Sicily and Sardinia, to his brother, and
left the fruits of his Italian conquest to his bastard, Ferdinand. This
Ferdinand, whose birth was buried in profound obscurity, was the
reigning sovereign in the year 1492. Of a cruel and sombre
temperament, traitorous and tyrannical, Ferdinand was hated by his
subjects as much as Alfonso had been loved. He possessed, however, to
a remarkable degree, the qualities which at that epoch constituted a
consummate statesman; and though the history of his reign is the
history of plots and conspiracies, of judicial murders and forcible
assassinations, of famines produced by iniquitous taxation, and of
every kind of diabolical tyranny, Ferdinand contrived to hold his own,
in the teeth of a rebellious baronage or a maddened population. His
political sagacity amounted almost to a prophetic instinct in the last
years of his life, when he became aware that the old order was breaking
up in Italy, and had cause to dread that Charles VIII. of France would
prove his title to the kingdom of Naples by force of arms.[13]
Such were the component parts of the Italian body politic, with the
addition of numerous petty principalities and powers, adhering more or
less consistently to one or other of the greater States. The whole
complex machine was bound together by no sense of common interest,
animated by no common purpose, amenable to no central authority.
Even such community of feeling as one spoken language gives, was
lacking. And yet Italy distinguished herself clearly from the rest of
Europe, not merely as a geographical fact, but also as a people
intellectually and spiritually one. The rapid rise of humanism had aided
in producing this national self-consciousness. Every State and every
city was absorbed in the recovery of culture and in the development of
art and literature. Far in advance of the other European nations, the
Italians regarded the rest of the world as barbarous, priding themselves
the while, in spite of mutual jealousies and hatreds, on their Italic
civilisation. They were enormously wealthy. The resources of the Papal
treasury, the private fortunes of the Florentine bankers, the riches of the
Venetian merchants might have purchased all that France or Germany
possessed of value. The single Duchy of Milan yielded to its masters
700,000 golden florins of revenue, according to the computation of De
Comines. In default of a confederative system, the several States were
held in equilibrium by diplomacy. By far the most important people,
next to the despots and the captains of adventure, were ambassadors
and orators. War itself had become a matter of arrangement, bargain,
and diplomacy. The game of stratagem was played by generals who
had been friends yesterday and might be friends again to-morrow, with
troops who felt no loyalty whatever for the standards under which they
listed. To avoid slaughter and to achieve the ends of warfare by parade
and demonstration was the interest of every one concerned. Looking
back upon Italy of the fifteenth century, taking account of her religious
deadness and moral corruption, estimating the absence of political
vigour in the republics and the noxious tyranny of the despots,
analysing her lack of national spirit, and comparing her splendid life of
cultivated ease with the want of martial energy, we can see but too
plainly that contact with a simpler and stronger people could not but
produce a terrible catastrophe. The Italians themselves, however, were
far from comprehending this. Centuries of undisturbed internal intrigue
had accustomed them to play the game of forfeits with each other, and
nothing warned them that the time was come at which diplomacy,
finesse, and craft would stand them in ill stead against rapacious
conquerors.
The storm which began to gather over Italy in the year 1492 had its first
beginning in the North. Lodovico Sforza's position in the Duchy of
Milan was becoming every day more difficult, when a slight and to all
appearances insignificant incident converted his apprehension of
danger into panic. It was customary for the States of Italy to
congratulate a new Pope on his election by their ambassadors; and this
ceremony had now to be performed for Roderigo Borgia. Lodovico
proposed that his envoys should go to Rome together with those of
Venice, Naples, and Florence; but Piero de' Medici, whose vanity made
him wish to send an embassy in his own name, contrived that
Lodovico's proposal should be rejected both by Florence and the King
of Naples. So strained was the situation of Italian affairs that Lodovico
saw in this repulse a menace to his own usurped authority. Feeling
himself isolated among the princes of his country, rebuffed by the
Medici, and coldly treated by the King of Naples, he turned in his
anxiety to France, and advised the young king, Charles VIII., to make
good his claim upon the Regno. It was a bold move to bring the
foreigner thus into Italy; and even Lodovico, who prided himself upon
his sagacity, could not see how things would end. He thought his
situation so hazardous, however, that any change must be for the better.
Moreover, a French invasion of Naples would tie the hands of his
natural foe, King Ferdinand, whose granddaughter, Isabella of Aragon,
had married Giovanni Galeazzo Sforza, and was now the rightful
Duchess of Milan. When the Florentine ambassador at Milan asked him
how he had the courage to expose Italy to such peril, his reply betrayed
the egotism of his policy: 'You talk to me of Italy; but when have I
looked Italy in the face? No one ever gave a thought to my affairs. I
have, therefore, had to give them such security as I could.'
Charles VIII. was young, light-brained, romantic, and ruled by
parvenus, who had an interest in disturbing the old order of the
monarchy. He lent a willing ear to Lodovico's invitation, backed as this
was by the eloquence and passion of numerous Italian refugees and
exiles. Against the advice of his more prudent counsellors, he taxed all
the resources of his kingdom, and concluded treaties on
disadvantageous terms with England, Germany, and Spain, in order that
he might be able to concentrate all his attention upon the Italian
expedition. At the end of the year 1493, it was known that the invasion
was resolved upon. Gentile Becchi, the Florentine envoy at the Court of
France, wrote to Piero de' Medici: 'If the King succeeds, it is all over
with Italy--tutta a bordello.' The extraordinary selfishness of the
several Italian States at this critical moment deserves to be noticed. The
Venetians, as Paolo Antonio Soderini described them to Piero de'
Medici, 'are of opinion that to keep quiet, and to see other potentates of
Italy spending and suffering, cannot but be to their advantage. They
trust no one, and feel sure they have enough money to be able at any
moment to raise sufficient troops, and so to guide events according to
their inclinations.' As the invasion was directed against Naples,
Ferdinand of Aragon displayed the acutest sense of the situation.
'Frenchmen,' he exclaimed, in what appears like a prophetic passion
when contrasted with the cold indifference of others no less really
menaced, 'have never come into Italy without inflicting ruin; and this
invasion, if rightly considered, cannot but bring universal ruin,
although it seems to menace us alone.' In his agony Ferdinand applied
to Alexander VI. But the Pope looked coldly upon him, because the
King of Naples, with rare perspicacity, had predicted that his elevation
to the Papacy would prove disastrous to Christendom. Alexander
preferred to ally himself with Venice and Milan. Upon this Ferdinand
wrote as follows: 'It seems fated that the Popes should leave no peace
in Italy. We are compelled to fight; but the Duke of Bari (i.e. Lodovico
Sforza) should think what may ensue from the tumult he is stirring up.
He who raises this wind will not be able to lay the tempest when he
likes. Let him look to the past, and he will see how every time that our
internal quarrels have brought Powers from beyond the Alps into Italy,
these have oppressed and lorded over her.'
Terribly verified as these words were destined to be,--and they were no
less prophetic in their political sagacity than Savonarola's prediction of
the Sword and bloody Scourge,--it was now too late to avert the
coming ruin. On March 1, 1494, Charles was with his army at Lyons.
Early in September he had crossed the pass of Mont Genêvre and taken
up his quarters in the town of Asti. There is no need to describe in
detail the holiday march of the French troops through Lombardy,
Tuscany, and Rome, until, without having struck a blow of
consequence, the gates of Naples opened to receive the conqueror upon
February 22, 1495. Philippe de Comines, who parted from the King at
Asti and passed the winter as his envoy at Venice, has more than once
recorded his belief that nothing but the direct interposition of
Providence could have brought so mad an expedition to so successful a
conclusion. 'Dieu monstroit conduire l'entreprise,' No sooner, however,
was Charles installed in Naples than the States of Italy began to
combine against him. Lodovico Sforza had availed himself of the
general confusion consequent upon the first appearance of the French,
to poison his nephew. He was, therefore, now the titular, as well as
virtual, Lord of Milan. So far, he had achieved what he desired, and had
no further need of Charles. The overtures he now made to the
Venetians and the Pope terminated in a League between these Powers
for the expulsion of the French from Italy. Germany and Spain entered
into the same alliance; and De Comines, finding himself treated with
marked coldness by the Signory of Venice, despatched a courier to
warn Charles in Naples of the coming danger. After a stay of only fifty
days in his new capital, the French King hurried northward. Moving
quickly through the Papal States and Tuscany, he engaged his troops in
the passes of the Apennines near Pontremoli, and on July 5, 1495, took
up his quarters in the village of Fornovo. De Comines reckons that his
whole fighting force at this time did not exceed 9,000 men, with
fourteen pieces of artillery. Against him at the opening of the valley
was the army of the League, numbering some 35,000 men, of whom
three-fourths were supplied by Venice, the rest by Lodovico Sforza and
the German Emperor. Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, was the
general of the Venetian forces; and on him, therefore, fell the real
responsibility of the battle.
De Comines remarks on the imprudence of the allies, who allowed
Charles to advance as far as Fornovo, when it was their obvious policy
to have established themselves in the village and so have caught the
French troops in a trap. It was a Sunday when the French marched
down upon Fornovo. Before them spread the plain of Lombardy, and
beyond it the white crests of the Alps. 'We were,' says De Comines, 'in
a valley between two little mountain flanks, and in that valley ran a
river which could easily be forded on foot, except when it is swelled
with sudden rains. The whole valley was a bed of gravel and big stones,
very difficult for horses, about a quarter of a league in breadth, and on
the right bank lodged our enemies.' Any one who has visited Fornovo
can understand the situation of the two armies. Charles occupied the
village on the right bank of the Taro. On the same bank, extending
downward toward the plain, lay the host of the allies; and in order that
Charles should escape them, it was necessary that he should cross the
Taro, just below its junction with the Ceno, and reach Lombardy by
marching in a parallel line with his foes.
All through the night of Sunday it thundered and rained incessantly; so
that on the Monday morning the Taro was considerably swollen. At
seven o'clock the King sent for De Comines, who found him already
armed and mounted on the finest horse he had ever seen. The name of
this charger was Savoy. He was black, one-eyed, and of middling
height; and to his great courage, as we shall see, Charles owed life upon
that day. The French army, ready for the march, now took to the
gravelly bed of the Taro, passing the river at a distance of about a
quarter of a league from the allies. As the French left Fornovo, the light
cavalry of their enemies entered the village and began to attack the
baggage. At the same time the Marquis of Mantua, with the flower of
his men-at-arms, crossed the Taro and harassed the rear of the French
host; while raids from the right bank to the left were constantly being
made by sharpshooters and flying squadrons. 'At this moment,' says De
Comines, 'not a single man of us could have escaped if our ranks had
once been broken.' The French army was divided into three main
bodies. The vanguard consisted of some 350 men-at-arms, 3000
Switzers, 300 archers of the Guard, a few mounted crossbow-men, and
the artillery. Next came the Battle, and after this the rearguard. At the
time when the Marquis of Mantua made his attack, the French
rearguard had not yet crossed the river. Charles quitted the van, put
himself at the head of his chivalry, and charged the Italian horsemen,
driving them back, some to the village and others to their camp. De
Comines observes, that had the Italian knights been supported in this
passage of arms by the light cavalry of the Venetian force, called
Stradiots, the French must have been outnumbered, thrown into
confusion, and defeated. As it was, these Stradiots were engaged in
plundering the baggage of the French; and the Italians, accustomed to
bloodless encounters, did not venture, in spite of their immense
superiority of numbers, to renew the charge. In the pursuit of Gonzaga's
horsemen Charles outstripped his staff, and was left almost alone to
grapple with a little band of mounted foemen. It was here that his noble
horse, Savoy, saved his person by plunging and charging till assistance
came up from the French, and enabled the King to regain his van.
It is incredible, considering the nature of the ground and the number of
the troops engaged, that the allies should not have returned to the attack
and have made the passage of the French into the plain impossible. De
Comines, however, assures us that the actual engagement only lasted a
quarter of an hour, and the pursuit of the Italians three quarters of an
hour. After they had once resolved to fly, they threw away their lances
and betook themselves to Reggio and Parma. So complete was their
discomfiture, that De Comines gravely blames the want of military
genius and adventure in the French host. If, instead of advancing along
the left bank of the Taro and there taking up his quarters for the night,
Charles had recrossed the stream and pursued the army of the allies, he
would have had the whole of Lombardy at his discretion. As it was, the
French army encamped not far from the scene of the action in great
discomfort and anxiety. De Comines had to bivouac in a vineyard,
without even a mantle to wrap round him, having lent his cloak to the
King in the morning; and as it had been pouring all day, the ground
could not have afforded very luxurious quarters. The same
extraordinary luck which had attended the French in their whole
expedition, now favoured their retreat; and the same pusillanimity
which the allies had shown at Fornovo, prevented them from
re-forming and engaging with the army of Charles upon the plain. One
hour before daybreak on Tuesday morning, the French broke up their
camp and succeeded in clearing the valley. That night they lodged at
Fiorenzuola, the next at Piacenza, and so on; till on the eighth day they
arrived at Asti without having been so much as incommoded by the
army of the allies in their rear.
Although the field of Fornovo was in reality so disgraceful to the
Italians, they reckoned it a victory upon the technical pretence that the
camp and baggage of the French had been seized. Illuminations and
rejoicings made the piazza of S. Mark in Venice gay, and Francesco da
Gonzaga had the glorious Madonna della Vittoria painted for him by
Mantegna, in commemoration of what ought only to have been
remembered with shame.
A fitting conclusion to this sketch, connecting its close with the
commencement, may be found in some remarks upon the manner of
warfare to which the Italians of the Renaissance had become
accustomed, and which proved so futile on the field of Fornovo. During
the middle ages, and in the days of the Communes, the whole male
population of Italy had fought light-armed on foot. Merchant and
artisan left the counting-house and the workshop, took shield and pike,
and sallied forth to attack the barons in their castles, or to meet the
Emperor's troops upon the field. It was with this national militia that
the citizens of Florence freed their Contado of the nobles, and the
burghers of Lombardy gained the battle of Legnano. In course of time,
by a process of change which it is not very easy to trace, heavily armed
cavalry began to take the place of infantry in mediæval warfare.
Men-at-arms, as they were called, encased from head to foot in iron,
and mounted upon chargers no less solidly caparisoned, drove the
foot-soldiers before them at the points of their long lances. Nowhere in
Italy do they seem to have met with the fierce resistance which the
bears of the Swiss Oberland and the bulls of Uri offered to the knights
of Burgundy. No Tuscan Arnold von Winkelried clasped a dozen
lances to his bosom that the foeman's ranks might thus be broken at the
cost of his own life; nor did it occur to the Italian burghers to meet the
charge of the horsemen with squares protected by bristling spears. They
seem, on the contrary, to have abandoned military service with the
readiness of men whose energies were already absorbed in the affairs of
peace. To become a practised and efficient man-at-arms required long
training and a life's devotion. So much time the burghers of the free
towns could not spare to military service, while the petty nobles were
only too glad to devote themselves to so honourable a calling. Thus it
came to pass that a class of professional fighting-men was gradually
formed in Italy, whose services the burghers and the princes bought,
and by whom the wars of the peninsula were regularly farmed by
contract. Wealth and luxury in the great cities continued to increase;
and as the burghers grew more comfortable, they were less inclined to
take the field in their own persons, and more disposed to vote large
sums of money for the purchase of necessary aid. At the same time this
system suited the despots, since it spared them the peril of arming their
own subjects, while they taxed them to pay the services of foreign
captains. War thus became a commerce. Romagna, the Marches of
Ancona, and other parts of the Papal dominions, supplied a number of
petty nobles whose whole business in life it was to form companies of
trained horsemen, and with these bands to hire themselves out to the
republics and the despots. Gain was the sole purpose of these captains.
They sold their service to the highest bidder, fighting irrespectively of
principle or patriotism, and passing with the coldest equanimity from
the camp of one master to that of his worst foe. It was impossible that
true military spirit should survive this prostitution of the art of war. A
species of mock warfare prevailed in Italy. Battles were fought with a
view to booty more than victory; prisoners were taken for the sake of
ransom; bloodshed was carefully avoided, for the men who fought on
either side in any pitched field had been comrades with their present
foemen in the last encounter, and who could tell how soon the general
of the one host might not need his rival's troops to recruit his own ranks?
Like every genuine institution of the Italian Renaissance, warfare was
thus a work of fine art, a masterpiece of intellectual subtlety; and like
the Renaissance itself, this peculiar form of warfare was essentially
transitional. The cannon and the musket were already in use; and it
only required one blast of gunpowder to turn the sham-fight of courtly,
traitorous, finessing captains of adventure into something terribly more
real. To men like the Marquis of Mantua war had been a highly
profitable game of skill; to men like the Maréchal de Gié it was a
murderous horseplay; and this difference the Italians were not slow to
perceive. When they cast away their lances at Fornovo, and fled--in
spite of their superior numbers--never to return, one fair-seeming sham
of the fifteenth century became a vision of the past.
*****
FLORENCE AND THE MEDICI
Di Firenze in prima si divisono intra loro i nobili, dipoi i nobili e il
popolo, e in ultimo il popolo e la plebe; e molte volte occorse che una
di queste parti rimasa superiore, si divise in due.--MACHIAVELLI.
I
Florence, like all Italian cities, owed her independence to the duel of
the Papacy and Empire. The transference of the imperial authority
beyond the Alps had enabled the burghs of Lombardy and Tuscany to
establish a form of self-government. This government was based upon
the old municipal organisation of duumvirs and decemvirs. It was, in
fact, nothing more or less than a survival from the ancient Roman
system. The proof of this was, that while vindicating their rights as
towns, the free cities never questioned the validity of the imperial title.
Even after the peace of Constance in 1183, when Frederick Barbarossa
acknowledged their autonomy, they received within their walls a
supreme magistrate, with power of life and death and ultimate appeal in
all decisive questions, whose title of Potestà indicated that he
represented the imperial power--Potestas. It was not by the assertion of
any right, so much as by the growth of custom, and by the weakness of
the Emperors, that in course of time each city became a sovereign State.
The theoretical supremacy of the Empire prevented any other authority
from taking the first place in Italy. On the other hand, the practical
inefficiency of the Emperors to play their part encouraged the
establishment of numerous minor powers amenable to no controlling
discipline.
The free cities derived their strength from industry, and had nothing in
common with the nobles of the surrounding country. Broadly speaking,
the population of the towns included what remained in Italy of the old
Roman people. This Roman stock was nowhere stronger than in
Florence and Venice--Florence defended from barbarian incursions by
her mountains and marshes, Venice by the isolation of her lagoons. The
nobles, on the contrary, were mostly of foreign origin--Germans,
Franks, and Lombards, who had established themselves as feudal lords
in castles apart from the cities. The force which the burghs acquired as
industrial communities was soon turned against these nobles. The
larger cities, like Milan and Florence, began to make war upon the
lords of castles, and to absorb into their own territory the small towns
and villages around them. Thus in the social economy of the Italians
there were two antagonistic elements ready to range themselves
beneath any banners that should give the form of legitimate warfare to
their mutual hostility. It was the policy of the Church in the twelfth
century to support the cause of the cities, using them as a weapon
against the Empire, and stimulating the growing ambition of the
burghers. In this way Italy came to be divided into the two
world-famous factions known as Guelf and Ghibelline. The struggle
between Guelf and Ghibelline was the struggle of the Papacy for the
depression of the Empire, the struggle of the great burghs face to face
with feudalism, the struggle of the old Italie stock enclosed in cities
with the foreign nobles established in fortresses. When the Church had
finally triumphed by the extirpation of the House of Hohenstaufen, this
conflict of Guelf and Ghibelline was really ended. Until the reign of
Charles V. no Emperor interfered to any purpose in Italian affairs. At
the same time the Popes ceased to wield a formidable power. Having
won the battle by calling in the French, they suffered the consequences
of this policy by losing their hold on Italy during the long period of
their exile at Avignon. The Italians, left without either Pope or Emperor,
were free to pursue their course of internal development, and to
prosecute their quarrels among themselves. But though the names of
Guelf and Ghibelline lost their old significance after the year 1266 (the
date of King Manfred's death), these two factions had so divided Italy
that they continued to play a prominent part in her annals. Guelf still
meant constitutional autonomy, meant the burgher as against the noble,
meant industry as opposed to feudal lordship. Ghibelline meant the rule
of the few over the many, meant tyranny, meant the interest of the
noble as against the merchant and the citizen. These broad distinctions
must be borne in mind, if we seek to understand how it was that a city
like Florence continued to be governed by parties, the European force
of which had passed away.
II
Florence first rose into importance during the papacy of Innocent III.
Up to this date she had been a town of second-rate distinction even in
Tuscany. Pisa was more powerful by arms and commerce. Lucca was
the old seat of the dukes and marquises of Tuscany. But between the
years 1200 and 1250 Florence assumed the place she was to hold
thenceforward, by heading the league of Tuscan cities formed to
support the Guelf party against the Ghibellines. Formally adopting the
Guelf cause, the Florentines made themselves the champions of
municipal liberty in Central Italy; and while they declared war against
the Ghibelline cities, they endeavoured to stamp out the very name of
noble in their State. It is not needful to describe the varying fortunes of
the Guelfs and Ghibellines, the burghers and the nobles, during the
thirteenth and the first half of the fourteenth centuries. Suffice it to say
that through all the vicissitudes of that stormy period the name Guelf
became more and more associated with republican freedom in Florence.
At last, after the final triumph of that party in 1253, the Guelfs
remained victors in the city. Associating the glory of their
independence with Guelf principles, the citizens of Florence
perpetuated within their State a faction that, in its turn, was destined to
prove perilous to liberty.
When it became clear that the republic was to rule itself henceforth
untrammelled by imperial interference, the people divided themselves
into six districts, and chose for each district two Ancients, who
administered the government in concert with the Potestà and the
Captain of the People. The Ancients were a relic of the old Roman
municipal organisation. The Potestà who was invariably a noble
foreigner selected by the people, represented the extinct imperial right,
and exercised the power of life and death within the city. The Captain
of the People, who was also a foreigner, headed the burghers in their
military capacity, for at that period the troops were levied from the
citizens themselves in twenty companies. The body of the citizens, or
the popolo, were ultimately sovereigns in the State. Assembled under
the banners of their several companies, they formed a parlamento for
delegating their own power to each successive government. Their
representatives, again, arranged in two councils, called the Council of
the People and the Council of the Commune, under the presidency of
the Captain of the People and the Potestà, ratified the measures which
had previously been proposed and carried by the executive authority or
Signoria. Under this simple State system the Florentines placed
themselves at the head of the Tuscan League, fought the battles of the
Church, asserted their sovereignty by issuing the golden florin of the
republic, and flourished until 1266.
III
In that year an important change was effected in the Constitution. The
whole population of Florence consisted, on the one hand, of nobles or
Grandi, as they were called in Tuscany, and on the other hand of
working people. The latter, divided into traders and handicraftsmen,
were distributed in guilds called Arti; and at that time there were seven
Greater and five Lesser Arti, the most influential of all being the Guild
of the Wool Merchants. These guilds had their halls for meeting, their
colleges of chief officers, their heads, called Consoli or Priors, and their
flags. In 1266 it was decided that the administration of the
commonwealth should be placed simply and wholly in the hands of the
Arti, and the Priors of these industrial companies became the lords or
Signory of Florence. No inhabitant of the city who had not enrolled
himself as a craftsman in one of the guilds could exercise any function
of burghership. To be scioperato, or without industry, was to be
without power, without rank or place of honour in the State. The
revolution which placed the Arts at the head of the republic had the
practical effect of excluding the Grandi altogether from the government.
Violent efforts were made by these noble families, potent through their
territorial possessions and foreign connections, and trained from
boyhood in the use of arms, to recover the place from which the new
laws thrust them: but their menacing attitude, instead of intimidating
the burghers, roused their anger and drove them to the passing of still
more stringent laws. In 1293, after the Ghibellines had been defeated in
the great battle of Campaldino, a series of severe enactments, called the
Ordinances of Justice, were decreed against the unruly Grandi. All
civic rights were taken from them; the severest penalties were attached
to their slightest infringement of municipal law; their titles to land were
limited; the privilege of living within the city walls was allowed them
only under galling restrictions; and, last not least, a supreme magistrate,
named the Gonfalonier of Justice, was created for the special purpose
of watching them and carrying out the penal code against them.
Henceforward Florence was governed exclusively by merchants and
artisans. The Grandi hastened to enrol themselves in the guilds,
exchanging their former titles and dignities for the solid privilege of
burghership. The exact parallel to this industrial constitution for a
commonwealth, carrying on wars with emperors and princes, holding
haughty captains in its pay, and dictating laws to subject cities, cannot,
I think, be elsewhere found in history. It is as unique as the Florence of
Dante and Giotto is unique. While the people was guarding itself thus
stringently against the Grandi, a separate body was created for the
special purpose of extirpating the Ghibellines. A permanent committee
of vigilance, called the College or the Captains of the Guelf Party, was
established. It was their function to administer the forfeited possessions
of Ghibelline rebels, to hunt out suspected citizens, to prosecute them
for Ghibellinism, to judge them, and to punish them as traitors to the
commonwealth. This body, like a little State within the State, proved
formidable to the republic itself through the unlimited and undefined
sway it exercised over burghers whom it chose to tax with treason. In
course of time it became the oligarchical element within the Florentine
democracy, and threatened to change the free constitution of the city
into a government conducted by a few powerful families.
There is no need to dwell in detail on the internal difficulties of
Florence during the first half of the fourteenth century. Two main
circumstances, however, require to be briefly noticed. These are (i) the
contest of the Blacks and Whites, so famous through the part played in
it by Dante; and (ii) the tyranny of the Duke[1] of Athens, Walter de
Brienne. The feuds of the Blacks and Whites broke up the city into
factions, and produced such anarchy that at last it was found necessary
to place the republic under the protection of foreign potentates. Charles
of Valois was first chosen, and after him the Duke of Athens, who took
up his residence in the city. Entrusted with dictatorial authority, he used
his power to form a military despotism. Though his reign of violence
lasted rather less than a year, it bore important fruits; for the tyrant,
seeking to support himself upon the favour of the common people, gave
political power to the Lesser Arts at the expense of the Greater, and
confused the old State-system by enlarging the democracy. The net
result of these events for Florence was, first, that the city became
habituated to rancorous party-strife, involving exiles and proscriptions;
and, secondly, that it lost its primitive social hierarchy of classes.
IV
After the Guelfs had conquered the Ghibellines, and the people had
absorbed the Grandi in their guilds, the next chapter in the troubled
history of Florence was the division of the Popolo against itself. Civil
strife now declared itself as a conflict between labour and capital. The
members of the Lesser Arts, craftsmen who plied trades subordinate to
those of the Greater Arts, rose up against their social and political
superiors, demanding a larger share in the government, a more equal
distribution of profits, higher wages, and privileges that should place
them on an absolute equality with the wealthy merchants. It was in the
year 1378 that the proletariate broke out into rebellion. Previous events
had prepared the way for this revolt. First of all, the republic had been
democratised through the destruction of the Grandi and through the
popular policy pursued to gain his own ends by the Duke of Athens.
Secondly, society had been shaken to its very foundation by the great
plague of 1348. Both Boccaccio and Matteo Villani draw lively
pictures of the relaxed morality and loss of order consequent upon this
terrible disaster; nor had thirty years sufficed to restore their relative
position to grades and ranks confounded by an overwhelming calamity.
We may therefore reckon the great plague of 1348 among the causes
which produced the anarchy of 1378. Rising in a mass to claim their
privileges, the artisans ejected the Signory from the Public Palace, and
for awhile Florence was at the mercy of the mob. It is worthy of notice
that the Medici, whose name is scarcely known before this epoch, now
came for one moment to the front. Salvestro de' Medici was
Gonfalonier of Justice at the time when the tumult first broke out. He
followed the faction of the handicraftsmen, and became the hero of the
day. I cannot discover that he did more than extend a sort of passive
protection to their cause. Yet there is no doubt that the attachment of
the working classes to the House of Medici dates from this period. The
rebellion of 1378 is known in Florentine history as the Tumult of the
Ciompi. The name Ciompi strictly means the Wool-Carders. One set of
operatives in the city, and that the largest, gave its title to the whole
body of the labourers. For some months these craftsmen governed the
republic, appointing their own Signory and passing laws in their own
interest; but, as is usual, the proletariate found itself incapable of
sustained government. The ambition and discontent of the Ciompi
foamed themselves away, and industrious working men began to see
that trade was languishing and credit on the wane. By their own act at
last they restored the government to the Priors of the Greater Arti. Still
the movement had not been without grave consequences. It completed
the levelling of classes, which had been steadily advancing from the
first in Florence. After the Ciompi riot there was no longer not only any
distinction between noble and burgher, but the distinction between
greater and lesser guilds was practically swept away. The classes,
parties, and degrees in the republic were so broken up, ground down,
and mingled, that thenceforth the true source of power in the State was
wealth combined with personal ability. In other words, the proper
political conditions had been formed for unscrupulous adventurers.
Florence had become a democracy without social organisation, which
might fall a prey to oligarchs or despots. What remained of deeply
rooted feuds or factions--animosities against the Grandi, hatred for the
Ghibellines, jealousy of labour and capital--offered so many points of
leverage for stirring the passions of the people and for covering
personal ambition with a cloak of public zeal. The time was come for
the Albizzi to attempt an oligarchy, and for the Medici to begin the
enslavement of the State.
V
The Constitution of Florence offered many points of weakness to the
attacks of such intriguers. In the first place it was in its origin not a
political but an industrial organisation--a simple group of guilds
invested with the sovereign authority. Its two most powerful engines,
the Gonfalonier of Justice and the Guelf College, had been formed, not
with a view to the preservation of the government, but with the purpose
of quelling the nobles and excluding a detested faction. It had no
permanent head, like the Doge of Venice; no fixed senate like the
Venetian Grand Council; its chief magistrates, the Signory, were
elected for short periods of two months, and their mode of election was
open to the gravest criticism. Supposed to be chosen by lot, they were
really selected from lists drawn up by the factions in power from time
to time. These factions contrived to exclude the names of all but their
adherents from the bags, or borse, in which the burghers eligible for
election had to be inscribed. Furthermore, it was not possible for this
shifting Signory to conduct affairs requiring sustained effort and secret
deliberation; therefore recourse was being continually had to dictatorial
Commissions. The people, summoned in parliament upon the Great
Square, were asked to confer plenipotentiary authority upon a
committee called Balia, who proceeded to do what they chose in the
State, and who retained power after the emergency for which they were
created passed away. The same instability in the supreme magistracy
led to the appointment of special commissioners for war, and special
councils, or Pratiche, for the management of each department. Such
supplementary commissions not only proved the weakness of the
central authority, but they were always liable to be made the
instruments of party warfare. The Guelf College was another and a
different source of danger to the State. Not acting under the control of
the Signory, but using its own initiative, this powerful body could
proscribe and punish burghers on the mere suspicion of Ghibellinism.
Though the Ghibelline faction had become an empty name, the Guelf
College excluded from the franchise all and every whom they chose on
any pretext to admonish. Under this mild phrase, to admonish, was
concealed a cruel exercise of tyranny--it meant to warn a man that he
was suspected of treason, and that he had better relinquish the exercise
of his burghership. By free use of this engine of Admonition, the Guelf
College rendered their enemies voiceless in the State, and were able to
pack the Signory and the councils with their own creatures. Another
important defect in the Florentine Constitution was the method of
imposing taxes. This was done by no regular system. The party in
power made what estimate it chose of a man's capacity to bear taxation,
and called upon him for extraordinary loans. In this way citizens were
frequently driven into bankruptcy and exile; and since to be a debtor to
the State deprived a burgher of his civic rights, severe taxation was one
of the best ways of silencing and neutralising a dissentient.
I have enumerated these several causes of weakness in the Florentine
State-system, partly because they show how irregularly the
Constitution had been formed by the patching and extension of a
simple industrial machine to suit the needs of a great commonwealth;
partly because it was through these defects that the democracy merged
gradually into a despotism. The art of the Medici consisted in a
scientific comprehension of these very imperfections, a methodic use of
them for their own purposes, and a steady opposition to any attempts
made to substitute a stricter system. The Florentines had determined to
be an industrial community, governing themselves on the co-operative
principle, dividing profits, sharing losses, and exposing their
magistrates to rigid scrutiny. All this in theory was excellent. Had they
remained an unambitious and peaceful commonwealth, engaged in the
wool and silk trade, it might have answered. Modern Europe might
have admired the model of a communistic and commercial democracy.
But when they engaged in aggressive wars, and sought to enslave
sister-cities like Pisa and Lucca, it was soon found that their simple
trading constitution would not serve. They had to piece it out with
subordinate machinery, cumbrous, difficult to manage, ill-adapted to
the original structure. Each limb of this subordinate machinery,
moreover, was a point d'appui for insidious and self-seeking party
leaders.
Florence, in the middle of the fourteenth century, was a vast beehive of
industry. Distinctions of rank among burghers, qualified to vote and
hold office, were theoretically unknown. Highly educated men, of more
than princely wealth, spent their time in shops and counting-houses,
and trained their sons to follow trades. Military service at this period
was abandoned by the citizens; they preferred to pay mercenary troops
for the conduct of their wars. Nor was there, as in Venice, any outlet for
their energies upon the seas. Florence had no navy, no great port--she
only kept a small fleet for the protection of her commerce. Thus the
vigour of the commonwealth was concentrated on itself; while the
influence of the citizens, through their affiliated trading-houses,
correspondents, and agents, extended like a network over Europe. In a
community of this kind it was natural that wealth--rank and titles being
absent--should alone confer distinction. Accordingly we find that out of
the very bosom of the people a new plutocratic aristocracy begins to
rise. The Grandi are no more; but certain families achieve distinction
by their riches, their numbers, their high spirit, and their ancient place
of honour in the State. These nobles of the purse obtained the name of
Popolani Nobili; and it was they who now began to play at high stakes
for the supreme power. In all the subsequent vicissitudes of Florence
every change takes place by intrigue and by clever manipulation of the
political machine. Recourse is rarely had to violence of any kind, and
the leaders of revolutions are men of the yard-measure, never of the
sword. The despotism to which the republic eventually succumbed was
no less commercial than the democracy had been. Florence in the days
of her slavery remained a Popolo.
VI
The opening of the second half of the fourteenth century had been
signalised by the feuds of two great houses, both risen from the people.
These were the Albizzi and the Ricci. At this epoch there had been a
formal closing of the lists of burghers;--henceforth no new families
who might settle in the city could claim the franchise, vote in the
assemblies, or hold magistracies. The Guelf College used their old
engine of admonition to persecute novi homines, whom they dreaded as
opponents. At the head of this formidable organisation the Albizzi
placed themselves, and worked it with such skill that they succeeded in
driving the Ricci out of all participation in the government. The tumult
of the Ciompi formed but an episode in their career toward oligarchy;
indeed, that revolution only rendered the political material of the
Florentine republic more plastic in the hands of intriguers, by removing
the last vestiges of class distinctions and by confusing the old parties of
the State.
When the Florentines in 1387 engaged in their long duel with Gian
Galeazzo Visconti, the difficulty of conducting this war without some
permanent central authority still further confirmed the power of the
rising oligarchs. The Albizzi became daily more autocratic, until in
1393 their chief, Maso degli Albizzi, a man of strong will and prudent
policy, was chosen Gonfalonier of Justice. Assuming the sway of a
dictator he revised the list of burghers capable of holding office, struck
out the private opponents of his house, and excluded all names but
those of powerful families who were well affected towards an
aristocratic government. The great house of the Alberti were exiled in a
body, declared rebels, and deprived of their possessions, for no reason
except that they seemed dangerous to the Albizzi. It was in vain that the
people murmured against these arbitrary acts. The new rulers were
omnipotent in the Signory, which they packed with their own men, in
the great guilds, and in the Guelf College. All the machinery invented
by the industrial community for its self-management and self-defence
was controlled and manipulated by a close body of aristocrats, with the
Albizzi at their head. It seemed as though Florence, without any visible
alteration in her forms of government, was rapidly becoming an
oligarchy even less open than the Venetian republic. Meanwhile the
affairs of the State were most flourishing. The strong-handed masters of
the city not only held the Duke of Milan in check, and prevented him
from turning Italy into a kingdom; they furthermore acquired the cities
of Pisa, Livorno, Arezzo, Montepulciano, and Cortona, for Florence,
making her the mistress of all Tuscany, with the exception of Siena,
Lucca, and Volterra. Maso degli Albizzi was the ruling spirit of the
commonwealth, spending the enormous sum of 11,500,000 golden
florins on war, raising sumptuous edifices, protecting the arts, and
acting in general like a powerful and irresponsible prince.
In spite of public prosperity there were signs, however, that this rule of
a few families could not last. Their government was only maintained by
continual revision of the lists of burghers, by elimination of the
disaffected, and by unremitting personal industry. They introduced no
new machinery into the Constitution whereby the people might be
deprived of its titular sovereignty, or their own dictatorship might be
continued with a semblance of legality. Again, they neglected to win
over the new nobles (nobili popolani) in a body to their cause; and thus
they were surrounded by rivals ready to spring upon them when a false
step should be made. The Albizzi oligarchy was a masterpiece of art,
without any force to sustain it but the craft and energy of its
constructors. It had not grown up, like the Venetian oligarchy, by the
gradual assimilation to itself of all the vigour in the State. It was bound,
sooner or later, to yield to the renascent impulse of democracy inherent
in Florentine institutions.
VII
Maso degli Albizzi died in 1417. He was succeeded in the government
by his old friend, Niccolo da Uzzano, a man of great eloquence and
wisdom, whose single word swayed the councils of the people as he
listed. Together with him acted Maso's son, Rinaldo, a youth of even
more brilliant talents than his father, frank, noble, and high-spirited, but
far less cautious.
The oligarchy, which these two men undertook to manage, had
accumulated against itself the discontent of overtaxed, disfranchised,
jealous burghers. The times, too, were bad. Pursuing the policy of
Maso, the Albizzi engaged the city in a tedious and unsuccessful war
with Filippo Maria Visconti, which cost 350,000 golden florins, and
brought no credit. In order to meet extraordinary expenses they raised
new public loans, thereby depreciating the value of the old Florentine
funds. "What was worse, they imposed forced subsidies with grievous
inequality upon the burghers, passing over their friends and adherents,
and burdening their opponents with more than could be borne. This
imprudent financial policy began the ruin of the Albizzi. It caused a
clamour in the city for a new system of more just taxation, which was
too powerful to be resisted. The voice of the people made itself loudly
heard; and with the people on this occasion sided Giovanni de' Medici.
This was in 1427.
It is here that the Medici appear upon that memorable scene where in
the future they are to play the first part. Giovanni de' Medici did not
belong to the same branch of his family as the Salvestro who favoured
the people at the time of the Ciompi Tumult. But he adopted the same
popular policy. To his sons Cosimo and Lorenzo he bequeathed on his
deathbed the rule that they should invariably adhere to the cause of the
multitude, found their influence on that, and avoid the arts of factious
and ambitious leaders. In his own life he had pursued this course of
conduct, acquiring a reputation for civic moderation and impartiality
that endeared him to the people and stood his children in good stead.
Early in his youth Giovanni found himself almost destitute by reason of
the imposts ch