Florentine Notes

I

Yesterday that languid organism known as the Florentine Carnival

put on a momentary semblance of vigour, and decreed a general

corso through the town. The spectacle was not brilliant,

but it suggested some natural reflections. I encountered the line

of carriages in the square before Santa Croce, of which they were

making the circuit. They rolled solemnly by, with their inmates

frowning forth at each other in apparent wrath at not finding

each other more worth while. There were no masks, no costumes, no

decorations, no throwing of flowers or sweetmeats. It was as if

each carriageful had privately and not very heroically resolved

not to be at costs, and was rather discomfited at finding that it

was getting no better entertainment than it gave. The middle of

the piazza was filled with little tables, with shouting

mountebanks, mostly disguised in battered bonnets and crinolines,

offering chances in raffles for plucked fowls and kerosene lamps.

I have never thought the huge marble statue of Dante, which

overlooks the scene, a work of the last refinement; but, as it

stood there on its high pedestal, chin in hand, frowning down on

all this cheap foolery, it seemed to have a great moral

intention. The carriages followed a prescribed course--through

Via Ghibellina, Via del Proconsolo, past the Badia and the

Bargello, beneath the great tessellated cliffs of the Cathedral,

through Via Tornabuoni and out into ten minutes' sunshine beside

the Arno. Much of all this is the gravest and stateliest part of

Florence, a quarter of supreme dignity, and there was an almost

ludicrous incongruity in seeing Pleasure leading her train

through these dusky historic streets. It was most uncomfortably

cold, and in the absence of masks many a fair nose was

fantastically tipped with purple. But as the carriages crept

solemnly along they seemed to keep a funeral march--to follow an

antique custom, an exploded faith, to its tomb. The Carnival is

dead, and these good people who had come abroad to make merry

were funeral mutes and grave-diggers. Last winter in Rome it

showed but a galvanised life, yet compared with this humble

exhibition it was operatic. At Rome indeed it was too operatic.

The knights on horseback there were a bevy of circus-riders, and

I'm sure half the mad revellers repaired every night to the

Capitol for their twelve sous a day.

I have just been reading over the Letters of the President de

Brosses. A hundred years ago, in Venice, the Carnival lasted six

months; and at Rome for many weeks each year one was free, under

cover of a mask, to perpetrate the most fantastic follies and

cultivate the most remunerative vices. It's very well to read the

President's notes, which have indeed a singular interest; but

they make us ask ourselves why we should expect the Italians to

persist in manners and practices which we ourselves, if we had

responsibilities in the matter, should find intolerable. The

Florentines at any rate spend no more money nor faith on the

carnivalesque. And yet this truth has a qualification; for what

struck me in the whole spectacle yesterday, and prompted these

observations, was not at all the more or less of costume of the

occupants of the carriages, but the obstinate survival of the

merrymaking instinct in the people at large. There could be no

better example of it than that so dim a shadow of entertainment

should keep all Florence standing and strolling, densely packed

for hours, in the cold streets. There was nothing to see that

mightn't be seen on the Cascine any fine day in the year--nothing

but a name, a tradition, a pretext for sweet staring idleness.

The faculty of making much of common things and converting small

occasions into great pleasures is, to a son of communities

strenuous as ours are strenuous, the most salient characteristic

of the so-called Latin civilisations. It charms him and vexes

him, according to his mood; and for the most part it represents a

moral gulf between his own temperamental and indeed spiritual

sense of race, and that of Frenchmen and Italians, far wider than

the watery leagues that a steamer may annihilate. But I think his

mood is wisest when he accepts the "foreign" easy surrender to

all the senses as the sign of an unconscious philosophy of

life, instilled by the experience of centuries--the philosophy

of people who have lived long and much, who have discovered no

short cuts to happiness and no effective circumvention of effort,

and so have come to regard the average lot as a ponderous fact

that absolutely calls for a certain amount of sitting on the

lighter tray of the scales. Florence yesterday then took its

holiday in a natural, placid fashion that seemed to make its own

temper an affair quite independent of the splendour of the

compensation decreed on a higher line to the weariness of its

legs. That the corso was stupid or lively was the shame or

the glory of the powers "above"--the fates, the gods, the

forestieri, the town-councilmen, the rich or the stingy.

Common Florence, on the narrow footways, pressed against the

houses, obeyed a natural need in looking about complacently,

patiently, gently, and never pushing, nor trampling, nor

swearing, nor staggering. This liberal margin for festivals in

Italy gives the masses a more than man-of-the-world urbanity in

taking their pleasure.

Meanwhile it occurs to me that by a remote New England fireside

an unsophisticated young person of either s*x is reading in an

old volume of travels or an old romantic tale some account of

these anniversaries and appointed revels as old Catholic lands

offer them to view. Across the page swims a vision of sculptured

palace-fronts draped in crimson and gold and shining in a

southern sun; of a motley train of maskers sweeping on in

voluptuous confusion and pelting each other with nosegays and

love-letters. Into the quiet room, quenching the rhythm of the

Connecticut clock, floats an uproar of delighted voices, a medley

of stirring foreign sounds, an echo of far-heard music of a

strangely alien cadence. But the dusk is falling, and the

unsophisticated young person closes the book wearily and wanders

to the window. The dusk is falling on the beaten snow. Down the

road is a white wooden meeting-house, looking grey among the

drifts. The young person surveys the prospect a while, and then

wanders back and stares at the fire. The Carnival of Venice, of

Florence, of Rome; colour and costume, romance and rapture! The

young person gazes in the firelight at the flickering chiaroscuro

of the future, discerns at last the glowing phantasm of

opportunity, and determines with a wild heart-beat to go and see

it all--twenty years hence!

II

A couple of days since, driving to Fiesole, we came back by the

castle of Vincigliata. The afternoon was lovely; and, though

there is as yet (February 10th) no visible revival of vegetation,

the air was full of a vague vernal perfume, and the warm colours

of the hills and the yellow western sunlight flooding the plain

seemed to contain the promise of Nature's return to grace. It's

true that above the distant pale blue gorge of Vallombrosa the

mountain-line was tipped with snow; but the liberated soul of

Spring was nevertheless at large. The view from Fiesole seems

vaster and richer with each visit. The hollow in which Florence

lies, and which from below seems deep and contracted, opens out

into an immense and generous valley and leads away the eye into a

hundred gradations of distance. The place itself showed, amid its

chequered fields and gardens, with as many towers and spires as a

chess-board half cleared. The domes and towers were washed over

with a faint blue mist. The scattered columns of smoke,

interfused with the sinking sunlight, hung over them like

streamers and pennons of silver gauze; and the Arno, twisting and

curling and glittering here and there, was a serpent cross-

striped with silver.

Vincigliata is a product of the millions, the leisure and the

eccentricity, I suppose people say, of an English gentleman--Mr.

Temple Leader, whose name should be commemorated. You reach the

castle from Fiesole by a narrow road, returning toward Florence

by a romantic twist through the hills and passing nothing on its

way save thin plantations of cypress and cedar. Upward of twenty

years ago, I believe, this gentleman took a fancy to the

crumbling shell of a medi*** fortress on a breezy hill-top

overlooking the Val d' Arno and forthwith bought it and began to

"restore" it. I know nothing of what the original ruin may have

cost; but in the dusky courts and chambers of the present

elaborate structure this impassioned arch******* must have

buried a fortune. He has, however, the compensation of feeling

that he has erected a monument which, if it is never to stand a

feudal siege, may encounter at least some critical over-hauling.

It is a disinterested work of art and really a triumph of

******* culture. The author has reproduced with minute accuracy

a sturdy home-fortress of the fourteenth century, and has kept

throughout such rigid terms with his model that the result is

literally uninhabitable to degenerate moderns. It is simply a

massive facsimile, an elegant museum of archaic images, mainly

but most amusingly counterfeit, perched on a spur of the

Apennines. The place is most politely shown. There is a charming

cloister, painted with extremely clever "quaint" frescoes,

celebrating the deeds of the founders of the castle--a cloister

that is everything delightful a cloister should be except truly

venerable and employable. There is a beautiful castle court, with

the embattled tower climbing into the blue far above it, and a

spacious loggia with rugged medallions and mild-hued Luca della

Robbias fastened unevenly into the walls. But the apartments are

the great success, and each of them as good a "reconstruction" as

a tale of Walter Scott; or, to speak frankly, a much better one.

They are all low-beamed and vaulted, stone-paved, decorated in

grave colours and lighted, from narrow, deeply recessed windows,

through small leaden-ringed plates of opaque glass.

The details are infinitely ingenious and elaborately grim, and

the indoor atmosphere of mediaevalism most forcibly revived. No

compromising fact of domiciliary darkness and cold is spared us,

no producing condition of mediaeval manners not glanced at. There

are oaken benches round the room, of about six inches in depth,

and gaunt fauteuils of wrought leather, illustrating the

suppressed transitions which, as George Eliot says, unite all

contrasts--offering a visible link between the modern conceptions

of torture and of luxury. There are fireplaces nowhere but in the

kitchen, where a couple of sentry-boxes are inserted on either

side of the great hooded chimney-piece, into which people might

creep and take their turn at being toasted and smoked. One may

doubt whether this dearth of the hearthstone could have raged on

such a scale, but it's a happy stroke in the representation of an

Italian dwelling of any period. It shows how the graceful fiction

that Italy is all "meridional" flourished for some time before

being refuted by grumbling tourists. And yet amid this cold

comfort you feel the incongruous presence of a constant intuitive

regard for beauty. The shapely spring of the vaulted ceilings;

the richly figured walls, coarse and hard in substance as they

are; the charming shapes of the great platters and flagons in the

deep recesses of the quaintly carved black dressers; the

wandering hand of ornament, as it were, playing here and there

for its own diversion in unlighted corners--such things redress,

to our fond credulity, with all sorts of grace, the balance of

the picture.

And yet, somehow, with what dim, unillumined vision one fancies

even such inmates as those conscious of finer needs than the mere

supply of blows and beef and beer would meet passing their heavy

eyes over such slender household beguilements! These crepuscular

chambers at Vincigliata are a mystery and a challenge; they seem

the mere propounding of an answerless riddle. You long, as you

wander through them, turning up your coat-collar and wondering

whether ghosts can catch bronchitis, to answer it with some

positive notion of what people so encaged and situated "did," how

they looked and talked and carried themselves, how they took

their pains and pleasures, how they counted off the hours. Deadly

ennui seems to ooze out of the stones and hang in clouds in the

brown corners. No wonder men relished a fight and panted for a

fray. "Skull-smashers" were sweet, ears ringing with pain and

ribs cracking in a tussle were soothing music, compared with the

cruel quietude of the dim-windowed castle. When they came back

they could only have slept a good deal and eased their dislocated

bones on those meagre oaken ledges. Then they woke up and turned

about to the table and ate their portion of roasted sheep. They

shouted at each other across the board and flung the wooden

plates at the servingmen. They jostled and hustled and hooted and

bragged; and then, after gorging and boozing and easing their

doublets, they squared their elbows one by one on the greasy

table and buried their scarred foreheads and dreamed of a good

gallop after flying foes. And the women? They must have been

strangely simple--simpler far than any moral archraeologist can

show us in a learned restoration. Of course, their simplicity had

its graces and devices; but one thinks with a sigh that, as the

poor things turned away with patient looks from the viewless

windows to the same, same looming figures on the dusky walls,

they hadn't even the consolation of knowing that just this

attitude and movement, set off by their peaked coifs, their

falling sleeves and heavily-twisted trains, would sow the seed of

yearning envy--of sorts--on the part of later generations.

There are moods in which one feels the impulse to enter a tacit

protest against too gross an appetite for pure aesthetics in this

starving and sinning world. One turns half away, musingly, from

certain beautiful useless things. But the healthier state of mind

surely is to lay no tax on any really intelligent manifestation

of the curious, and exquisite. Intelligence hangs together

essentially, all along the line; it only needs time to make, as

we say, its connections. The massive pastiche of

Vincigliata has no superficial use; but, even if it were less

complete, less successful, less brilliant, I should feel a

reflective kindness for it. So disinterested and expensive a toy

is its own justification; it belongs to the heroics of

dilettantism.

III

One grows to feel the collection of pictures at the Pitti Palace

splendid rather than interesting. After walking through it once

or twice you catch the key in which it is pitched--you know what

you are likely not to find on closer examination; none of the

works of the uncompromising period, nothing from the half-groping

geniuses of the early time, those whose colouring was sometimes

harsh and their outlines sometimes angular. Vague to me the

principle on which the pictures were originally gathered and of

the aesthetic creed of the princes who chiefly selected them. A

princely creed I should roughly call it--the creed of people who

believed in things presenting a fine face to society; who

esteemed showy results rather than curious processes, and would

have hardly cared more to admit into their collection a work by

one of the laborious precursors of the full efflorescence than to

see a bucket and broom left standing in a state saloon. The

gallery contains in literal fact some eight or ten paintings of

the early Tuscan School--notably two admirable specimens of

Filippo Lippi and one of the frequent circular pictures of the

great Botticelli--a Madonna, chilled with tragic prescience,

laying a pale cheek against that of a blighted Infant. Such a

melancholy mother as this of Botticelli would have strangled her

baby in its cradle to rescue it from the future. But of

Botticelli there is much to say. One of the Filippo Lippis is

perhaps his masterpiece--a Madonna in a small rose-garden (such a

"flowery close" as Mr. William Morris loves to haunt), leaning

over an Infant who kicks his little human heels on the grass

while half-a-dozen curly-pated angels gather about him, looking

back over their shoulders with the candour of children in

tableaux vivants, and one of them drops an armful of

gathered roses one by one upon the baby. The delightful earthly

innocence of these winged youngsters is quite inexpressible.

Their heads are twisted about toward the spectator as if they

were playing at leap-frog and were expecting a companion to come

and take a jump. Never did "young" art, never did subjective

freshness, attempt with greater success to represent those

phases. But these three fine works are hung over the tops of

doors in a dark back room--the bucket and broom are thrust behind

a curtain. It seems to me, nevertheless, that a fine Filippo

Lippi is good enough company for an Allori or a Cigoli, and that

that too deeply sentient Virgin of Botticelli might happily

balance the flower-like irresponsibility of Raphael's "Madonna of

the Chair."

Taking the Pitti collection, however, simply for what it pretends

to be, it gives us the very flower of the sumptuous, the courtly,

the grand-ducal. It is chiefly official art, as one may say, but

it presents the fine side of the type--the brilliancy, the

facility, the amplitude, the sovereignty of good taste. I agree

on the whole with a nameless companion and with what he lately

remarked about his own humour on these matters; that, having

been on his first acquaintance with pictures nothing if not

critical, and held the lesson incomplete and the opportunity

slighted if he left a gallery without a headache, he had come, as

he grew older, to regard them more as the grandest of all

pleasantries and less as the most strenuous of all lessons, and

to remind himself that, after all, it is the privilege of art to

make us friendly to the human mind and not to make us suspicious

of it. We do in fact as we grow older unstring the critical bow a

little and strike a truce with invidious comparisons. We work off

the juvenile impulse to heated partisanship and discover that one

spontaneous producer isn't different enough from another to keep

the all-knowing Fates from smiling over our loves and our

aversions. We perceive a certain human solidarity in all

cultivated effort, and are conscious of a growing accommodation

of judgment--an easier disposition, the fruit of experience, to

take the joke for what it is worth as it passes. We have in short

less of a quarrel with the masters we don't delight in, and less

of an impulse to pin all our faith on those in whom, in more

zealous days, we fancied that we made our peculiar meanings. The

meanings no longer seem quite so peculiar. Since then we have

arrived at a few in the depths of our own genius that are not

sensibly less striking.

And yet it must be added that all this depends vastly on one's

mood--as a traveller's impressions do, generally, to a degree

which those who give them to the world would do well more

explicitly to declare. We have our hours of expansion and those

of contraction, and yet while we follow the traveller's trade we

go about gazing and judging with unadjusted confidence. We can't

suspend judgment; we must take our notes, and the notes are

florid or crabbed, as the case may be. A short time ago I spent a

week in an ancient city on a hill-top, in the humour, for which I

was not to blame, which produces crabbed notes. I knew it at the

time, but couldn't help it. I went through all the motions of

liberal appreciation; I uncapped in all the churches and on the

massive ramparts stared all the views fairly out of countenance;

but my imagination, which I suppose at bottom had very good

reasons of its own and knew perfectly what it was about, refused

to project into the dark old town and upon the yellow hills that

sympathetic glow which forms half the substance of our genial

impressions. So it is that in museums and palaces we are

alternate radicals and conservatives. On some days we ask but to

be somewhat sensibly affected; on others, Ruskin-haunted, to be

spiritually steadied. After a long absence from the Pitti Palace

I went back there the other morning and transferred myself from

chair to chair in the great golden-roofed saloons--the chairs are

all gilded and covered with faded silk--in the humour to be

diverted at any price. I needn't mention the things that diverted

me; I yawn now when I think of some of them. But an artist, for

instance, to whom my kindlier judgment has made permanent

concessions is that charming Andrea del Sarto. When I first knew

him, in my cold youth, I used to say without mincing that I

didn't like him. Cet ** est sans piti. The fine

sympathetic, melancholy, pleasing painter! He has a dozen faults,

and if you insist pedantically on your rights the conclusive word

you use about him will be the word weak. But if you are a

generous soul you will utter it low--low as the mild grave tone

of his own sought harmonies. He is monotonous, narrow,

incomplete; he has but a dozen different figures and but two or

three ways of distributing them; he seems able to utter but half

his thought, and his canvases lack apparently some final return

on the whole matter--some process which his impulse failed him

before he could bestow. And yet in spite of these limitations his

genius is both itself of the great pattern and lighted by the air

of a great period. Three gifts he had largely: an instinctive,

unaffected, unerring grace; a large and rich, and yet a sort of

withdrawn and indifferent sobriety; and best of all, as well as

rarest of all, an indescribable property of relatedness as to the

moral world. Whether he was aware of the connection or not, or in

what measure, I cannot say; but he gives, so to speak, the taste

of it. Before his handsome vague-browed Madonnas; the mild,

robust young saints who kneel in his foregrounds and look round

at you with a conscious anxiety which seems to say that, though

in the picture, they are not of it, but of your own sentient life

of commingled love and weariness; the stately apostles, with

comely heads and harmonious draperies, who gaze up at the high-

seated Virgin like early astronomers at a newly seen star--there

comes to you the brush of the dark wing of an inward life. A

shadow falls for the moment, and in it you feel the chill of

moral suffering. Did the Lippis suffer, father or son? Did

Raphael suffer? Did Titian? Did Rubens suffer? Perish the

thought--it wouldn't be fair to us that they should have

had everything. And I note in our poor second-rate Andrea an

element of interest lacking to a number of stronger talents.

Interspersed with him at the Pitti hang the stronger and the

weaker in splendid abundance. Raphael is there, strong in

portraiture--easy, various, bountiful genius that he was--and

(strong here isn't the word, but) happy beyond the common dream

in his beautiful "Madonna of the Chair." The general instinct of

posterity seems to have been to treat this lovely picture as a

semi-sacred, an almost miraculous, manifestation. People stand in

a worshipful silence before it, as they would before a taper-

studded shrine. If we suspend in imagination on the right of it

the solid, realistic, unidealised portrait of Leo the Tenth

(which hangs in another room) and transport to the left the

fresco of the School of Athens from the Vatican, and then reflect

that these were three separate fancies of a single youthful,

amiable genius we recognise that such a producing consciousness

must have been a "treat." My companion already quoted has a

phrase that he "doesn't care for Raphael," but confesses, when

pressed, that he was a most remarkable young man. Titian has a

dozen portraits of unequal interest. I never particularly noticed

till lately--it is very ill hung--that portentous image of the

Emperor Charles the Fifth. He was a burlier, more imposing

personage than his usual legend figures, and in his great puffed

sleeves and gold chains and full-skirted over-dress he seems to

tell of a tread that might sometimes have been inconveniently

resonant. But the purpose to have his way and work his

will is there--the great stomach for divine right, the old

monarchical temperament. The great Titian, in portraiture, however,

remains that formidable young man in black, with the small

compact head, the delicate nose and the irascible blue eye. Who

was he? What was he? "Ritratto virile" is all the

catalogue is able to call the picture. "Virile! " Rather! you

vulgarly exclaim. You may weave what romance you please about it,

but a romance your dream must be. Handsome, clever, defiant,

passionate, dangerous, it was not his own fault if he hadn't

adventures and to spare. He was a gentleman and a warrior, and

his adventures balanced between camp and court. I imagine him the

young orphan of a noble house, about to come into mortgaged

estates. One wouldn't have cared to be his guardian, bound to

paternal admonitions once a month over his precocious

transactions with the Jews or his scandalous abduction from her

convent of such and such a noble maiden.

The Pitti Gallery contains none of Titian's golden-toned groups;

but it boasts a lovely composition by Paul Veronese, the dealer

in silver hues--a Baptism of Christ. W---- named it to me the

other day as the picture he most enjoyed, and surely painting

seems here to have proposed to itself to discredit and

annihilate--and even on the occasion of such a subject--

everything but the loveliness of life. The picture bedims and

enfeebles its neighbours. We ask ourselves whether painting as

such can go further. It is simply that here at last the art

stands complete. The early Tuscans, as well as Leonardo, as

Raphael, as Michael, saw the great spectacle that surrounded them

in beautiful sharp-edged elements and parts. The great Venetians

felt its indissoluble unity and recognised that form and colour

and earth and air were equal members of every possible subject;

and beneath their magical touch the hard outlines melted together

and the blank intervals bloomed with meaning. In this beautiful

Paul Veronese of the Pitti everything is part of the charm--the

atmosphere as well as the figures, the look of radiant morning in

the white-streaked sky as well as the living human limbs, the

cloth of Venetian purple about the loins of the Christ as well as

the noble humility of his attitude. The relation to Nature of

the other Italian schools differs from that of the Venetian as

courtship--even ardent courtship--differs from marriage.

IV

I went the other day to the secularised Convent of San Marco,

paid my franc at the profane little wicket which creaks away at

the door--no less than six custodians, apparently, are needed to

turn it, as if it may have a recusant conscience--passed along

the bright, still cloister and paid my respects to Fra Angelico's

Crucifixion, in that dusky chamber in the basement. I looked

long; one can hardly do otherwise. The fresco deals with the

pathetic on the grand scale, and after taking in its beauty you

feel as little at liberty to go away abruptly as you would to

leave church during the sermon. You may be as little of a formal

Christian as Fra Angelico was much of one; you yet feel

admonished by spiritual decency to let so yearning a view of the

Christian story work its utmost will on you. The three crosses

rise high against a strange completely crimson sky, which deepens

mysteriously the tragic expression of the scene, though I remain

perforce vague as to whether this lurid background be a fine

intended piece of symbolism or an effective accident of time. In

the first case the extravagance quite triumphs. Between the

crosses, under no great rigour of composition, are scattered the

most exemplary saints--kneeling, praying, weeping, pitying,

worshipping. The swoon of the Madonna is depicted at the left,

and this gives the holy presences, in respect to the case, the

strangest historical or actual air. Everything is so real that

you feel a vague impatience and almost ask yourself how it was

that amid the army of his consecrated servants our Lord was

permitted to suffer. On reflection you see that the painter's

design, so far as coherent, has been simply to offer an immense

representation of Pity, and all with such concentrated truth that

his colours here seem dissolved in tears that drop and drop,

however softly, through all time. Of this single yearning

consciousness the figures are admirably expressive. No later

painter learned to render with deeper force than Fra Angelico the

one state of the spirit he could conceive--a passionate pious

tenderness. Immured in his quiet convent, he apparently never

received an intelligible impression of evil; and his conception

of human life was a perpetual sense of sacredly loving and being

loved. But how, immured in his quiet convent, away from the

streets and the studios, did he become that genuine, finished,

perfectly professional painter? No one is less of a mere mawkish

amateur. His range was broad, from this really heroic fresco to

the little trumpeting seraphs, in their opaline robes, enamelled,

as it were, on the gold margins of his pictures.

I sat out the sermon and departed, I hope, with the gentle

preacher's blessing. I went into the smaller refectory, near by,

to refresh my memory of the beautiful Last Supper of Domenico

Ghirlandaio. It would be putting things coarsely to say that I

adjourned thus from a sernlon to a comedy, though Ghirlandaio's

theme, as contrasted with the blessed Angelico's, was the

dramatic spectacular side of human life. How keenly he observed

it and how richly he rendered it, the world about him of colour

and costume, of handsome heads and pictorial groupings! In his

admirable school there is no painter one enjoys--pace

Ruskin--more sociably and irresponsibly. Lippo Lippi is simpler,

quainter, more frankly expressive; but we retain before him a

remnant of the sympathetic discomfort provoked by the masters

whose conceptions were still a trifle too large for their means.

The pictorial vision in their minds seems to stretch and strain

their undeveloped skill almost to a sense of pain. In Ghirlandaio

the skill and the imagination are equal, and he gives us a

delightful impression of enjoying his own resources. Of all the

painters of his time he affects us least as positively not of

ours. He enjoyed a crimson mantle spreading and tumbling in

curious folds and embroidered with needlework of gold, just as he

enjoyed a handsome well-rounded head, with vigorous dusky locks,

profiled in courteous adoration. He enjoyed in short the various

reality of things, and had the good fortune to live in an age

when reality flowered into a thousand amusing graces--to speak

only of those. He was not especially addicted to giving spiritual

hints; and yet how hard and meagre they seem, the professed and

finished realists of our own day, with the spiritual

bonhomie or candour that makes half Ghirlandaio's richness

left out! The Last Supper at San Marco is an excellent example of

the natural reverence of an artist of that time with whom

reverence was not, as one may say, a specialty. The main idea

with him has been the variety, the material bravery and

positively social charm of the scene, which finds expression,

with irrepressible generosity, in the accessories of the

background. Instinctively he imagines an opulent garden--imagines

it with a good faith which quite tides him over the reflection

that Christ and his disciples were poor men and unused to sit at

meat in palaces. Great full-fruited orange-trees peep over the

wall before which the table is spread, strange birds fly through

the air, while a peacock perches on the edge of the partition and

looks down on the sacred repast. It is striking that, without any

at all intense religious purpose, the figures, in their varied

naturalness, have a dignity and sweetness of attitude that admits

of numberless reverential constructions. I should call all this

the happy tact of a robust faith.

On the staircase leading up to the little painted cells of the

Beato Angelico, however, I suddenly faltered and paused. Somehow

I had grown averse to the intenser zeal of the Monk of Fiesole. I

wanted no more of him that day. I wanted no more macerated friars

and spear-gashed sides. Ghirlandaio's elegant way of telling his

story had put me in the humour for something more largely

intelligent, more profanely pleasing. I departed, walked across

the square, and found it in the Academy, standing in a particular

spot and looking up at a particular high-hung picture. It is

difficult to speak adequately, perhaps even intelligibly, of

Sandro Botticelli. An accomplished critic--Mr. Pater, in his

Studies on the History of the Renaissance--has lately paid

him the tribute of an exquisite, a supreme, curiosity. He was

rarity and distinction incarnate, and of all the multitudinous

masters of his group incomparably the most interesting, the one

who detains and perplexes and fascinates us most. Exquisitely

fine his imagination--infinitely audacious and adventurous his

fancy. Alone among the painters of his time he strikes us as

having invention. The glow and thrill of expanding observation--

this was the feeling that sent his comrades to their easels; but

Botticelli's moved him to reactions and emotions of which they

knew nothing, caused his faculty to sport and wander and explore

on its own account. These impulses have fruits often so ingenious

and so lovely that it would be easy to talk nonsense about them.

I hope it is not nonsense, however, to say that the picture to

which I just alluded (the "Coronation of the Virgin," with a

group of life-sized saints below and a garland of miniature

angels above) is one of the supremely beautiful productions of

the human mind. It is hung so high that you need a good glass to

see it; to say nothing of the unprecedented delicacy of the work.

The lower half is of moderate interest; but the dance of hand-

clasped angels round the heavenly couple above has a beauty newly

exhaled from the deepest sources of inspiration. Their perfect

little hands are locked with ineffable elegance; their blowing

robes are tossed into folds of which each line is a study; their

charming feet have the relief of the most delicate sculpture.

But, as I have already noted, of Botticelli there is much, too

much to say--besides which Mr. Pater has said all. Only add thus

to his inimitable grace of design that the exquisite pictorial

force driving him goes a-Maying not on wanton errands of its own,

but on those of some mystic superstition which trembles for ever

in his heart.

[Illustration: THE GREAT EAVES, FLORENCE]

V

The more I look at the old Florentine domestic architecture the

more I like it--that of the great examples at least; and if I

ever am able to build myself a lordly pleasure-house I don't see

how in conscience I can build it different from these. They are

sombre and frowning, and look a trifle more as if they were meant

to keep people out than to let them in; but what equally

"important" type--if there be an equally important--is more

expressive of domiciliary dignity and security and yet attests

them with a finer ******** economy? They are impressively

"handsome," and yet contrive to be so by the simplest means. I

don't say at the smallest pecuniary cost--that's another matter.

There is money buried in the thick walls and diffused through the

echoing excess of space. The merchant nobles of the fifteenth

century had deep and full pockets, I suppose, though the present

bearers of their names are glad to let out their palaces in

suites of apartments which are occupied by the commercial

aristocracy of another republic. One is told of fine old

mouldering chambers of which possession is to be enjoyed for a

sum not worth mentioning. I am afraid that behind these so

gravely harmonious fronts there is a good deal of dusky

discomfort, and I speak now simply of the large serious faces

themselves as you can see them from the street; see them ranged

cheek to cheek, in the grey historic light of Via dei Bardi, Via

Maggio, Via degli Albizzi. The force of character, the familiar

severity and majesty, depend on a few simple features: on the

great iron-caged windows of the rough-hewn basement; on the noble

stretch of space between the summit of one high, round-topped

window and the bottom of that above; on the high-hung sculptured

shield at the angle of the house; on the flat far-projecting

roof; and, finally, on the magnificent tallness of the whole

building, which so dwarfs our modern attempts at size. The finest

of these Florentine palaces are, I imagine, the tallest

habitations in Europe that are frankly and amply habitations--not

mere shafts for machinery of the American grain-elevator pattern.

Some of the creations of M. Haussmann in Paris may climb very

nearly as high; but there is all the difference in the world

between the impressiveness of a building which takes breath, as

it were, some six or seven times, from storey to storey, and of

one that erects itself to an equal height in three long-drawn

pulsations. When a house is ten windows wide and the drawing-room

floor is as high as a chapel it can afford but three floors.

The spaciousness of some of those ancient drawing-rooms is that

of a Russian steppe. The "family circle," gathered anywhere

within speaking distance, must resemble a group of pilgrims

encamped in the desert on a little oasis of carpet. Madame

Gryzanowska, living at the top of a house in that dusky, tortuous

old Borgo Pinti, initiated me the other evening most good-

naturedly, lamp in hand, into the far-spreading mysteries of her

apartment. Such quarters seem a translation into space of the

old-fashioned idea of leisure. Leisure and "room" have been

passing out of our manners together, but here and there, being of

stouter structure, the latter lingers and survives.

Here and there, indeed, in this blessed Italy, reluctantly modern

in spite alike of boasts and lamentations, it seems to have been

preserved for curiosity's and fancy's sake, with a vague, sweet

odour of the embalmer's spices about it. I went the other morning

to the Corsini Palace. The proprietors obviously are great

people. One of the ornaments of Rome is their great white-faced

palace in the dark Trastevere and its voluminous gallery, none

the less delectable for the poorness of the pictures. Here they

have a palace on the Arno, with another large, handsome,

respectable and mainly uninteresting collection. It contains

indeed three or four fine examples of early Florentines. It was

not especially for the pictures that I went, however; and

certainly not for the pictures that I stayed. I was under the

same spell as the inveterate companion with whom I walked the

other day through the beautiful private apartments of the Pitti

Palace and who said: "I suppose I care for nature, and I know

there have been times when I have thought it the greatest

pleasure in life to lie under a tree and gaze away at blue hills.

But just now I had rather lie on that faded sea-green satin sofa

and gaze down through the open door at that retreating vista of

gilded, deserted, haunted chambers. In other words I prefer a

good 'interior' to a good landscape. The impression has a greater

intensity--the thing itself a more complex animation. I like fine

old rooms that have been occupied in a fine old way. I like the

musty upholstery, the antiquated knick-knacks, the view out of

the tall deep-embrasured windows at garden cypresses rocking

against a grey sky. If you don't know why, I'm afraid I can't

tell you." It seemed to me at the Palazzo Corsini that I did know

why. In places that have been lived in so long and so much and in

such a fine old way, as my friend said--that is under social

conditions so multifold and to a comparatively starved and

democratic sense so curious--the past seems to have left a

sensible deposit, an aroma, an atmosphere. This ghostly presence

tells you no secrets, but it prompts you to try and guess a few.

What has been done and said here through so many years, what has

been ventured or suffered, what has been dreamed or despaired of?

Guess the riddle if you can, or if you think it worth your

ingenuity. The rooms at Palazzo Corsini suggest indeed, and seem

to recall, but a monotony of peace and plenty. One of them imaged

such a noble perfection of a home-scene that I dawdled there

until the old custodian came shuffling back to see whether

possibly I was trying to conceal a Caravaggio about my person: a

great crimson-draped drawing-room of the amplest and yet most

charming proportions; walls hung with large dark pictures, a

great concave ceiling frescoed and moulded with dusky richness,

and half-a-dozen south windows looking out on the Arno, whose

swift yellow tide sends up the light in a cheerful flicker. I

fear that in my appreciation of the particular effect so achieved

I uttered a monstrous folly--some momentary willingness to be

maimed or crippled all my days if I might pass them in such a

place. In fact half the pleasure of inhabiting this spacious

saloon would be that of using one's legs, of strolling up and

down past the windows, one by one, and making desultory journeys

from station to station and corner to corner. Near by is a

colossal ball-room, domed and pilastered like a Renaissance

cathedral, and super-abundantly decorated with marble effigies,

all yellow and grey with the years.

VI

In the Carthusian Monastery outside the Roman Gate, mutilated

and profaned though it is, one may still snuff up a strong if

stale redolence of old Catholicism and old Italy. The road to it

is ugly, being encumbered with vulgar waggons and fringed with

tenements suggestive of an Irish-American suburb. Your interest

begins as you come in sight of the convent perched on its little

mountain and lifting against the sky, around the bell-tower of

its gorgeous chapel, a coronet of clustered cells. You make your

way into the lower gate, through a clamouring press of deformed

beggars who thrust at you their stumps of limbs, and you climb

the steep hillside through a shabby plantation which it is proper

to fancy was better tended in the monkish time. The monks are not

totally abolished, the government having the grace to await the

natural extinction of the half-dozen old brothers who remain, and

who shuffle doggedly about the cloisters, looking, with their

white robes and their pale blank old faces, quite anticipatory

ghosts of their future selves. A prosaic, profane old man in a

coat and trousers serves you, however, as custodian. The

melancholy friars have not even the privilege of doing you the

honours of their dishonour. One must imagine the pathetic effect

of their former silent pointings to this and that conventual

treasure under stress of the feeling that such pointings were

narrowly numbered. The convent is vast and irregular--it bristles

with those picture-making arts and accidents which one notes as

one lingers and passes, but which in Italy the overburdened

memory learns to resolve into broadly general images. I rather

deplore its position at the gates of a bustling city--it ought

rather to be lodged in some lonely fold of the Apennines. And yet

to look out from the shady porch of one of the quiet cells upon

the teeming vale of the Arno and the clustered towers of Florence

must have deepened the sense of monastic quietude.

The chapel, or rather the church, which is of great proportions

and designed by Andrea Orcagna, the primitive painter, refines

upon the consecrated type or even quite glorifies it. The massive

cincture of black sculptured stalls, the dusky Gothic roof, the

high-hung, deep-toned pictures and the superb pavement of verd-

antique and dark red marble, polished into glassy lights, must

throw the white-robed figures of the gathered friars into the

highest romantic relief. All this luxury of worship has nowhere

such value as in the chapels of monasteries, where we find it

contrasted with the otherwise so ascetic economy of the

worshippers. The paintings and gildings of their church, the

gem-bright marbles and fantastic carvings, are really but the

monastic tribute to sensuous delight--an imperious need for which

the fond imagination of Rome has officiously opened the door. One

smiles when one thinks how largely a fine starved sense for the

forbidden things of earth, if it makes the most of its

opportunities, may gratify this need under cover of devotion.

Nothing is too base, too hard, too sordid for real humility, but

nothing too elegant, too amiable, too caressing, caressed,

caressable, for the exaltation of faith. The meaner the convent

cell the richer the convent chapel. Out of poverty and solitude,

inanition and cold, your honest friar may rise at his will into a

Mahomet's Paradise of luxurious analogies.

There are further various dusky subterranean oratories where a

number of bad pictures contend faintly with the friendly gloom.

Two or three of these funereal vaults, however, deserve mention.

In one of them, side by side, sculptured by Donatello in low

relief, lie the white marble effigies of the three members of

the Accaiuoli family who founded the convent in the thirteenth

century. In another, on his back, on the pavement, rests a grim

old bishop of the same stout race by the same honest craftsman.

Terribly grim he is, and scowling as if in his stony sleep he

still dreamed of his hates and his hard ambitions. Last and best,

in another low chapel, with the trodden pavement for its bed,

shines dimly a grand image of a later bishop--Leonardo

Buonafede, who, dying in 1545, owes his monument to Francesco di

San Gallo. I have seen little from this artist's hand, but it was

clearly of the cunningest. His model here was a very sturdy old

prelate, though I should say a very genial old man. The sculptor

has respected his monumental ugliness, but has suffused it with a

singular homely charm--a look of confessed physical comfort in

the privilege of paradise. All these figures have an inimitable

reality, and their lifelike marble seems such an incorruptible

incarnation of the genius of the place that you begin to think of

it as even more reckless than cruel on the part of the present

public powers to have begun to pull the establishment down,

morally speaking, about their ears. They are lying quiet yet a

while; but when the last old friar dies and the convent formally

lapses, won't they rise on their stiff old legs and hobble out to

the gates and thunder forth anathemas before which even a future

and more enterprising r**** may be disposed to pause?

Out of the great central cloister open the snug little detached

dwellings of the absent fathers. When I said just now that the

Certosa in Val d'Ema gives you a glimpse of old Italy I was

thinking of this great pillared quadrangle, lying half in sun and

half in shade, of its tangled garden-growth in the centre,

surrounding the ancient customary well, and of the intense blue

sky bending above it, to say nothing of the indispensable old

white-robed monk who pokes about among the lettuce and parsley.

We have seen such places before; we have visited them in that

divinatory glance which strays away into space for a moment over

the top of a suggestive book. I don't quite know whether it's

more or less as one's fancy would have it that the monkish cells

are no cells at all, but very tidy little appartements

complets, consisting of a couple of chambers, a sitting-room

and a spacious loggia, projecting out into space from the cliff-

like wall of the monastery and sweeping from pole to pole the

loveliest view in the world. It's poor work, however, taking

notes on views, and I will let this one pass. The little chambers

are terribly cold and musty now. Their odour and atmosphere are

such as one used, as a child, to imagine those of the school-room

during Saturday and Sunday.

VII

In the Roman streets, wherever you turn, the facade of a church

in more or less degenerate flamboyance is the principal feature

of the scene; and if, in the absence of purer motives, you are

weary of aesthetic trudging over the corrugated surface of the

Seven Hills, a system of pavement in which small cobble-stones

anomalously endowed with angles and edges are alone employed, you

may turn aside at your pleasure and take a reviving sniff at the

pungency of incense. In Florence, one soon observes, the churches

are relatively few and the dusky house-fronts more rarely

interrupted by specimens of that extraordinary architecture which

in Rome passes for sacred. In Florence, in other words,

ecclesiasticism is less cheap a commodity and not dispensed in

the same abundance at the street-corners. Heaven forbid, at the

same time, that I should undervalue the Roman churches, which are

for the most part treasure-houses of history, of curiosity, of

promiscuous and associational interest. It is a fact,

nevertheless, that, after St. Peter's, I know but one really

beautiful church by the Tiber, the enchanting basilica of St.

Mary Major. Many have structural character, some a great

allure, but as a rule they all lack the dignity of the

best of the Florentine temples. Here, the list being immeasurably

shorter and the seed less scattered, the principal churches are

all beautiful. And yet I went into the Annunziata the other day

and sat there for half-an-hour because, forsooth, the gildings

and the marbles and the frescoed dome and the great rococo shrine

near the door, with its little black jewelled fetish, reminded me

so poignantly of Rome. Such is the city properly styled eternal--

since it is eternal, at least, as regards the consciousness of

the individual. One loves it in its sophistications--though for

that matter isn't it all rich and precious sophistication?--

better than other places in their purity.

Coming out of the Annunziata you look past the bronze statue of

the Grand Duke Ferdinand I (whom Mr. Browning's heroine used to

watch for--in the poem of "The Statue and the Bust"--from the red

palace near by), and down a street vista of enchanting

picturesqueness. The street is narrow and dusky and filled with

misty shadows, and at its opposite end rises the vast bright-

coloured side of the Cathedral. It stands up in very much the

same mountainous fashion as the far-shining mass of the bigger

prodigy at Milan, of which your first glimpse as you leave your

hotel is generally through another such dark avenue; only that,

if we talk of mountains, the white walls of Milan must be likened

to snow and ice from their base, while those of the Duomo of

Florence may be the image of some mighty hillside enamelled with

blooming flowers. The big bleak interior here has a naked majesty

which, though it may fail of its effect at first, becomes after a

while extraordinarily touching. Originally disconcerting, it soon

inspired me with a passion. Externally, at any rate, it is one of

the loveliest works of man's hands, and an overwhelming proof

into the bargain that when elegance belittles grandeur you have

simply had a bungling artist.

Santa Croce within not only triumphs here, but would triumph

anywhere. "A trifle naked if you like," said my irrepressible

companion, "but that's what I call architecture, just as I don't

call bronze or marble clothes (save under urgent stress of

portraiture) statuary." And indeed we are far enough away from

the clustering odds and ends borrowed from every art and every

province without which the ritually builded thing doesn't trust

its spell to work in Rome. The vastness, the lightness, the open

spring of the arches at Santa Croce, the beautiful shape of the

high and narrow choir, the impression made as of mass without

weight and the gravity yet reigning without gloom--these are my

frequent delight, and the interest grows with acquaintance. The

place is the great Florentine Valhalla, the final home or

memorial harbour of the native illustrious dead, but that

consideration of it would take me far. It must be confessed

moreover that, between his coarsely-imagined statue out in front

and his horrible monument in one of the aisles, the author of

The Divine Comedy, for instance, is just hereabouts rather

an extravagant figure. "Ungrateful Florence," declaims Byron.

Ungrateful indeed--would she were more so! the susceptible spirit

of the great exile may be still aware enough to exclaim; in

common, that is, with most of the other immortals sacrificed on

so very large a scale to current Florentine "plastic" facility.

In explanation of which remark, however, I must confine myself to

noting that, as almost all the old monuments at Santa Croce are

small, comparatively small, and interesting and exquisite, so the

modern, well nigh without exception, are disproportionately vast

and pompous, or in other words distressingly vague and vain. The

aptitude of hand, the compositional assurance, with which such

things are nevertheless turned out, constitutes an anomaly

replete with suggestion for an observer of the present state of

the arts on the soil and in the air that once befriended them,

taking them all together, as even the soil and the air of Greece

scarce availed to do. But on this head, I repeat, there would be

too much to say; and I find myself checked by the same warning at

the threshold of the church in Florence really interesting beyond

Santa Croce, beyond all others. Such, of course, easily, is Santa

Maria Novella, where the chapels are lined and plated with

wonderful figured and peopled fresco-work even as most of those

in Rome with precious inanimate substances. These overscored

retreats of devotion, as dusky, some of them, as eremitic caves

swarming with importunate visions, have kept me divided all

winter between the love of Ghirlandaio and the fear of those

seeds of catarrh to which their mortal chill seems propitious

till far on into the spring. So I pause here just on the praise

of that delightful painter--as to the spirit of whose work the

reflections I have already made are but confirmed by these

examples. In the choir at Santa Maria Novella, where the incense

swings and the great chants resound, between the gorgeous

coloured window and the florid grand altar, he still "goes in,"

with all his might, for the wicked, the amusing world, the world

of faces and forms and characters, of every sort of curious human

and rare material thing.

[Illustration: BOBOLI GARDEN, FLORENCE.]

VIII

I had always felt the Boboli Gardens charming enough for me to

"haunt" them; and yet such is the interest of Florence in every

quarter that it took another corso of the same cheap

pattern as the last to cause me yesterday to flee the crowded

streets, passing under that archway of the Pitti Palace which

might almost be the gate of an Etruscan city, so that I might

spend the afternoon among the mouldy statues that compose with

their screens of cypress, looking down at our clustered towers

and our background of pale blue hills vaguely freckled with white

villas. These pleasure-grounds of the austere Pitti pile, with

its inconsequent charm of being so rough-hewn and yet somehow so

elegantly balanced, plead with a voice all their own the general

cause of the ample enclosed, planted, cultivated private

preserve--preserve of tranquillity and beauty and immunity--in

the heart of a city; a cause, I allow, for that matter, easy to

plead anywhere, once the pretext is found, the large, quiet,

distributed town-garden, with the vague hum of big grudging

boundaries all about it, but with everything worse excluded,

being of course the most insolently-pleasant thing in the world.

In addition to which, when the garden is in the Italian manner,

with flowers rather remarkably omitted, as too flimsy and easy

and cheap, and without lawns that are too smart, paths that are

too often swept and shrubs that are too closely trimmed, though

with a fanciful formalism giving style to its shabbiness, and

here and there a dusky ilex-walk, and here and there a dried-up

fountain, and everywhere a piece of mildewed sculpture staring at

you from a green alcove, and just in the right place, above all,

a grassy amphitheatre curtained behind with black cypresses and

sloping downward in mossy marble steps--when, I say, the place

possesses these attractions, and you lounge there of a soft

Sunday afternoon, the racier spectacle of the streets having made

your fellow-loungers few and left you to the deep stillness and

the shady vistas that lead you wonder where, left you to the

insidious irresistible mixture of nature and art, nothing too

much of either, only a supreme happy resultant, a divine

tertium quid: under these conditions, it need scarce be

said the revelation invoked descends upon you.

The Boboli Gardens are not large--you wonder how compact little

Florence finds room for them within her walls. But they are

scattered, to their extreme, their all-romantic advantage and

felicity, over a group of steep undulations between the rugged

and terraced palace and a still-surviving stretch of city wall,

where the unevenness of the ground much adds to their apparent

size. You may cultivate in them the fancy of their solemn and

haunted character, of something faint and dim and even, if you

like, tragic, in their prescribed, their functional smile; as if

they borrowed from the huge monument that overhangs them certain

of its ponderous memories and regrets. This course is open to

you, I mention, but it isn't enjoined, and will doubtless indeed

not come up for you at all if it isn't your habit, cherished

beyond any other, to spin your impressions to the last tenuity of

fineness. Now that I bethink myself I must always have happened

to wander here on grey and melancholy days. It remains none the

less true that the place contains, thank goodness--or at least

thank the grave, the infinitely-distinguished traditional

taste of Florence--no cheerful, trivial object, neither

parterres, nor pagodas, nor peacocks, nor swans. They have their

famous amphitheatre already referred to, with its degrees or

stone benches of a thoroughly aged and mottled complexion and its

circular wall of evergreens behind, in which small cracked images

and vases, things that, according to association, and with the

law of the same quite indefinable, may make as much on one

occasion for exquisite dignity as they may make on another for

(to express it kindly) nothing at all. Something was once done in

this charmed and forsaken circle--done or meant to be done; what

was it, dumb statues, who saw it with your blank eyes? Opposite

stands the huge flat-roofed palace, putting forward two great

rectangular arms and looking, with its closed windows and its

foundations of almost unreduced rock, like some ghost of a sample

of a ruder Babylon. In the wide court-like space between the

wings is a fine old white marble fountain that never plays. Its

dusty idleness completes the general air of abandonment.

Chancing on such a cluster of objects in Italy--glancing at them

in a certain light and a certain mood--I get (perhaps on too easy

terms, you may think) a sense of history that takes away

my breath. Generations of Medici have stood at these closed

windows, embroidered and brocaded according to their period, and

held fetes champetres and floral games on the greensward,

beneath the mouldering hemicycle. And the Medici were great

people! But what remains of it all now is a mere tone in the air,

a faint sigh in the breeze, a vague expression in things, a

passive--or call it rather, perhaps, to be fair, a shyly,

pathetically responsive--accessibility to the yearning guess.

Call it much or call it little, the ineffaceability of this deep

stain of experience, it is the interest of old places and the

bribe to the brooding analyst. Time has devoured the doers and

their doings, but there still hangs about some effect of their

passage. We can "layout" parks on virgin soil, and cause them to

bristle with the most expensive importations, but we

unfortunately can't scatter abroad again this seed of the

eventual human soul of a place--that comes but in its time and

takes too long to grow. There is nothing like it when it

has come.