Chapter 27

SPURS IN THE PICTURE GALLERIES.

Florence, city of my delight! how do I thrill at the recollection of the asylum afforded me by thee in the Via Parione. The room was tiled, and cool, and high, and its single window looked out upon a real palace, where the family of Corsini, presided over by a porter in cocked hat and an exuberance of gold lace, gave me frequent glimpses of gauze dresses and glorious eyes, whose owners sometimes came to the casement to watch the poor little foreigner, writing so industriously.

Every young traveller has two or three subjects of unrest. Mine were girls and art. The copyists in the galleries were more beautiful studies to me than the paintings. The next time I go to Europe, I shall take enough money along to give all the pretty ones an order; this will be an introduction, and I shall know how they live, and how much money they make, and what passions have heaved their beautiful bosoms, to make their slow, quiet lives forever haunted and longing.

Love, love! There are only two grand, unsatiated passions, which keep us forever in freshness and fever,--love and art.

In Italy I breathed the purest atmosphere; all the world was a landscape picture; all the skies were spilling blueness and crimson upon the mountains; all the faces were Madonnas; all the perspectives were storied architecture. Westward the star of Empire takes its way, but that of art shines steadily in the East. Thither look our American young men, no matter at which of its altars they make their devotions,--painting, sculpture, or architecture. And I, who had known some fondness for the pencil till lured into the wider, wilder field of letters, felt almost an artist's joy when I stood in the presence of those solemn masters whose works are inspired and imperishable, like religion.

Having passed the first thrill and disappointment,--for pure art speaks only to the pure by intuition or initiation, and I was yet a novice,--my old newspaper curiosity revived to learn of the successful living rather than of the grand dead.

Correspondents, like poets, are born, not made: the venerable associations around me--monuments, cloisters, palaces, the homes and graves of great men whom I revered, the aisles where every canvas bore a spell name--could not wean me from that old, reportorial habit of asking questions, peeping into private nooks, and making notes upon contemporary things, just as I had done for three years, in cities, on routes, on battle-fields. And as the old world seemed to me only a great art museum, I longed to look behind the tapestry at the Ghobelin weavers, pulling the beautiful threads.

"Where dwell these gay and happy students, who quit our hard, bright skies, and land of angularities, to inhale the dews of these sedative mosses, and, by attrition with masterpieces, glean something of the spirit of the masters?"

Straightway the faery realm opened to me, and two months of Italian rambling were spent in association with the folk I esteemed only less than my own exemplars.

Art, in all ages, is the flowery way. No pursuit gives so great joy in the achieving, none achieved yields higher meed of competence, contentment, and repute. Its ambition is more genial and subdued than that of literature, its rivalry more courteous and exalting; its daily life should be pastoral and domestic, free from those feverish mutations and adventures which cross the incipient author, and it is forever surrounded by bright and beautiful objects which linger too long upon the eye to stir the mind to more than emulation.

Is it harsh to say that artists have been too well rewarded, and thinkers and writers too ill? Vasari dines at the ducal table, while Galileo's pension is the rack; the mob which carries Cimabue's canvas in triumph, drives Dante into exile; Rubens is a king's ambassador, and Grotius is sent to jail; to Reynolds's levees, poor, bankrupt Goldsmith steals like an unwelcome guest, and Apelles's gold is paid to him in measures, while Homer, singing immortal lines, goes blind and begging.

Art students take rank in Italy among the best of travellers, but Bohemianism in art is at one's peril. There are many wasted lives among the clever fellows who go abroad ostensibly for study. I recall Jimman, who was an expert with the pencil, and who colored with excellent discrimination. He went to Dusseldorf at first, and became known to Leutze, who praised his sketches. He began to associate at once with students and tipplers, and dissipated less by drinking than by talking. I have a theory that more men are lost to themselves and the age by a love of "gabbing" than by drinking. It is not hard to eschew cognac and claret, but there is no cure for "buzzing." There is a drunkenness of talk which takes possession of one, and Jimman would have had the _delirium tremens_ in a week, with nobody to listen to him. To my mind the Trappiste takes the severest of monastic vows.

Jimman used to rise in the morning betimes, full of inflexible resolution. Having stretched his canvas, and carefully prepared his pigments, he went to breakfast, pondering great achievements. Here he fell in with a lot of Germans,--the most incurable race of gossipers in the world,--and while they discussed, in a learned way, every subject under the sun, the meal extended into the afternoon, and Jimman concluded that it was then too late to undertake anything. In this way his ambition burnt away, his money was squandered, he lost facility of manipulation, and came back to Paris at the age of twenty-eight, to pursue the same listless, garrulous existence; debts and grisettes, buzzing and brandy, the utterance of resolves which expired in the utterance, and Jimman finally became, perforce, a common apprentice to a moulder, that he might not entirely starve.

I saw him, for the last time, in the Louvre, looking at Zurbaran's "Kneeling Monk."

"Ah, Townsend," he said, "I might have done something like that. All my zeal is gone."

And he began to chat in the same loose, familiar way. Dumbness and deafness would have been endowments rather than deprivations for him.

I had rooms in Florence with Gypsum and Stagg. The former was a young, industrious fellow, of German descent, who worked hard, but not wisely. He spent half a year in copying a face by Paul Veronese, and the other half in sketching an old convent yard. But he did not visit, and an artist, to get orders and take rank, must be seen as well as be earnest. He need not be hail-fellow, but should keep well in the circle of respectable travellers; for these are to be his patrons, if he pleases them. Gypsum was over-modest and too conscientious; he had only a trifle of money, and was careless of his attire. So he disregarded society, and society forgot him. Therefore, at dawn, he betook himself to the old convent-yard, and stood at his easel bravely, never so unhappy as when one of the church's innumerable holy days arrived, for then he was forbidden to work upon the convent premises. With all his conscientiousness he received no orders; while Stagg, who was not more clever, proportioned to his longer experience, was befriended on every hand, because he went to the American chapel regularly and wore a dress-coat at the sociables.

Stagg used the old studio of Buchanan Read, just off the Via Seragli.

I stumbled upon him one morning, and saw more than I anticipated.

A young, plump girl, without so much as a fig-leaf upon her, was posing before his easel, so motionless that she scarcely winked, one hand extended and clasping her loosened tresses, and bending upon one white and dimpled knee.

She had the large dark eyes of the professional _modello_, and a bosom as ripe as Titian's Venus. Her feet were small, and her hands very white and beautiful. But of me she took no more notice than if I had been a bird alighting upon the window, or a mouse peeping at her from the edge of his knot-hole.

Old Stagg, who was commonly grave as a clergyman, now and then left his easel to alter her position, and when he was done, she gathered up her clothes, which had lain in a heap on the floor, and took her few silver pieces with a "_Mille grazie, Signore!_" and went home to take dinner with her little brothers.

A studio in Florence costs only fifteen or twenty francs a month,--seldom so much. There are a series of excellent ones in the same Via Seragli, in a very large dismantled convent. There is a well in the centre of its great courtyard, and innumerable ropes lead from it to the various high windows of the building, on which buckets of water are forever ascending. All this of which I speak refers to a year ago, when Florence was not a capital; doubtless, studios command more at present.

The models at Florence were to me strange personages. There was a drawing-school which I sometimes attended, where one old woman kept three daughters, aged respectively twenty, seventeen, and thirteen years. They lived pretty much as they were born, and while they posed upon a high platform, the old woman took her seat near the door and looked on with grim satisfaction. She was very careful of their moral habits, but the second one she lost by an excess of greed. She resolved to make them useful by day, as well as by night, and put them to work at the studios of individual artists. But as no one artist wanted three models, the girls had to separate, and, out of the mother's vigilance, the second one, Orsolo, went to the atelier of a wicked and handsome fellow, and met with the usual romance of her class.

The oldest girl, Luigia, married a man-model, and their nuptials must have been of a most prosaic character.

Among the many men who thus stood for the artists, was one old fellow, tall, and bearded, and massively characterized, who used to remain motionless for hours; until he seemed to be dead. He had been a model in every stage of life, from childhood to the grave, and represented every subject from Garibaldi to Moses.

The walks in and around Florence occupied all my Sabbaths. Stagg and I used to stroll up to Fiesole, by the villa where Boccaccio's party of story-tellers met, and look up old pictures in the village church; we measured the proportions of the chapel on the hill of Saint Miniato, and he endeavored in vain to imitate the hue of the light as it fell through the veined marble of Serravezza; we spent contemplative afternoons in the house of Michael Angelo, and went up to Vallambrosa, at the risk of our necks, to look at a Giotto no bigger than a tea-plate. In Florence there is enough out-of-door statuary to make one of the finest galleries in the world. The majesty of Donatello's "Saint George" arises before me when I would conceive of any noble humanity, and the sweep of Orgagna's great arches give me an idea of vastness like the sea; in the Pitti palace only giants should abide; the Campanile goes up to heaven as beautiful as Jacob's ladder, and in the perpetual twilight of the Duomo I was not of half the stature I believed when roaming under the loftier sky.

I saw a jail in Florence, and it troubled me; who in that beautiful city could do a crime? How should old age, or bad passions, or sickness, or shame, exist in that limpid atmosphere, in the shadow of such architecture, in the presence of those pictures?