Chapter 21

In the marble court, roofed only by the blue Venetian sky, stood Mr. Barrett Browning's statue of "Dryope" in bronze, on its marble pedestal,--a beautiful conception of the Dryope of Keats,--the dweller in forest solitudes whom the Hamadryads transformed into a poplar. Here a fountain makes music all day long, and the court is also adorned in summer by great Venetian jars of pink hydrangeas in full bloom. The grand staircase, with its carved balustrade and the wide landing where a rose window decorates the wall, leads to the lofty salons which were yet as homelike as they were artistic during the residence of the Brownings. Mr. Story's bust of Mrs. Browning, other portrait busts of both the poets, sculptured by their artist son, and by others, and other memorials abound. In the library were gathered many interesting volumes, autographed from their authors, and many rare and choice editions, among which was one of the "Sonnets from the Portuguese" in a sumptuous volume whose artistic beauty found a fitting setting to Mrs. Browning's immortal sonnets. Among other volumes were a collection of signed "Etchings" by Sir Laurence Alma-Tadema; presentation copies from Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Aubrey De Vere, Walter Savage Landor, and many another known to fame; and a copy, also, of a study of Mrs. Browning's poetry[4] by an American writer.

There is one memento over which the visitor always smiled--a souvenir of a London evening in 1855 when the Brownings had invited Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his brother and Lord Madox Brown to meet Tennyson and listen to his reading of his new poem, "Maud," then still unpublished. During the reading Rossetti drew a caricature representing Tennyson with his hair standing on end, his eyes glowering and his hand theatrically extended, as he held a manuscript inscribed,

"I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood."

A reproduction of John Singer Sargent's painting, "The Gypsy Dance," bore the inscription, "To _mon ami_, Browning." From the library is a niche, decorated in gold, with memorial entablatures to the memory of Mrs. Browning. On the outer wall of the palace is an inscription that runs:--

"Robert Browning died in this house 12th December, 1889.

"Open my heart and you will see Graven inside it 'Italy.'"

There is a sadness in the fact that this palace, consecrated to the memory of the immortal poets, husband and wife, has passed into the hands of strangers; but that is a part of the play in a world in which we have no continuing city. In the spring of 1905, Miss Sarianna Browning died in the home of her nephew, near Florence, and her body was buried in the new Protestant cemetery in that city; the old one, where all that was mortal of Elizabeth Barrett Browning was laid to rest, being now closed. Mr. Barrett Browning, in his Tuscan villa, is again dwelling near Florence, his native city, which must forever hold to him its atmosphere of consecrated beauty as the beloved home of his mother,--the noblest and greatest of all woman poets.

The centenary of Carlo Goldoni was celebrated in Venice in the spring of 1907 by the publication of all his works and a monograph on his life; an exhibition of personal relics; the presentation of one of his dramas set to music by Baldassare Galuppi, the great Venetian composer of his time, and by a procession to lay a wreath of laurel on his monument in the Campo San Bartolommeo. The drama given, entitled the "Buranello," was the last work of the author, and it was presented in the theatre Goldoni. The Municipal Council of Venice voted the sum of fifty thousand lire for the _édition de luxe_, which consists of twenty volumes, in octavo. In each volume is a different portrait of Goldoni, facsimile of manuscripts, and the reproduction of literary curiosities.

The monograph of Goldoni was issued by the press of the Venetian Institute of Graphic Art in a limited number of copies.

It contains more than three hundred printed pages and a series of very interesting illustrations. Among these are the reproductions of ancient engravings which are most rare (such as the view of the Grimani Theatre at San Giovanni Crisostomo, a famous theatre existing in the days of the Venetian republic, but now demolished), frontispieces of destroyed editions, and other personal memorials. The revival of the splendid work of the famous artist was one of the attractions of the festa of celebration. The art exhibition of Venice in this spring of 1907 was very picturesque. One special salon was allotted to the artists of Great Britain, and there was a fine loan collection of the portraits of English noblemen painted by Mr. Sargent. This salon was decorated with panels by Frank Brangwyn.

Venice forever remains a dream, a mirage, an enchantment. Has it a recognized social life, with "seasons" that come and go? Has it trade, commerce, traffic? Has it any existence save on the artist's canvas, in the poet's vision? Has it a resident population to whom it is a home, and not the pilgrimage of passionate pilgrims?

There are those who find this Venice of all the year round a society of stately nobles whose ancestral claims are identified with the history of the city and who are at home in its palaces and gondolas, but of this resident life the visitor is less aware than of that in any other city in Italy. For him it remains forever in his memory as the crowning glory of June evenings when the full, golden moon hangs over towers and walls, when gondolas freighted with Venetian singers loom up out of the shadows and fill the air with melody that echoes as in dreams, and that vanishes--one knows not when or where. Mr. Howells, in his delightful "Venetian Days," has interpreted much of that life that the tourist never recognizes, that eludes his sight; and the Dream City still, to the visitor who comes and goes, shrouds itself in myth and mystery. One of the poetic visions of Venice is that given in Robert Underwood Johnson's "Browning at Asolo" (inscribed to Mrs. Arthur Bronson), of which the opening stanzas run:--

"This is the loggia Browning loved, High on the flank of the friendly town; These are the hills that his keen eye roved, The green like a cataract leaping down To the plain that his pen gave new renown.

"There to the West what a range of blue!-- The very background Titian drew To his peerless Loves. O tranquil scene! Who than thy poet fondlier knew The peaks and the shore and the lore between?

"See! yonder's his Venice--the valiant Spire, Highest one of the perfect three, Guarding the others: the Palace choir, The Temple flashing with opal fire-- Bubble and foam of the sunlit sea."

Edgar Fawcett, always enchanted with his Venetian days, pictures the northern lagoon, some six miles from Venice, as "a revel of pastoral greenness, with briery hedges, numberless wild flowers and the most captivating of sinuous creeks, overarched by an occasional bridge, so old that you greet with respect every moss-grown inch of its drowsy and sagging brickwork. The cathedral, the ineludible cathedral of all Italian settlements, is reached after a short ramble, and you enter it with mingled awe and amusement," he continues. "Some of its mosaics, representing martyrs being devoured by flames and evidently enjoying themselves a great deal during this mortuary process, challenge the disrespectful smile. But others are vested with a rude yet sacred poetry, and certain semi-Oriental marble sculptures, adjacent to the altar, would make an infidel feel like crossing himself for the crime of having yielded to a humorous twinge. This duomo dates far back beyond the Middle Ages, and so does the small Church of Santa Fosca, only a step away. What renders Torcello so individual among all the islands and islets of the lagoon, I should say, is her continual contrast between the ever-recurrent idyllicism of open meadows or wilding clusters of simple rustic thickets, and the enormous antiquity of these two hoary ecclesiastic fanes. History is in the air, and you feel that the very daisies you crush underfoot, the very copses from which you pluck a scented spray, have their delicate rustic ancestries, dating back to Attila, who is said once to have brought his destructive presence where now such sweet solemnity of desertion and quietude unmolestedly rules."

History and legend and art and romance meet and mingle to create that indefinable sorcery of Venice. It is like nothing on earth except a poet's dream, and his poetic dream is of the ethereal realm. The wonderful music that floats over the "silver trail" of still waters; the mystic silences; the resplendence of color,--all, indeed, weave themselves into an incantation of the gods; it is the ineffable loveliness of Paradise where the rose of morning glows "and the June is always June," and it is no more earth, but a celestial atmosphere,--this glory of June in Venice.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] This inscription and a description in detail of all the memorials of Elizabeth Barrett Browning are given in full in a volume entitled "A Study of Elizabeth Barrett Browning." Boston: Little, Brown, & Co.

[4] "A Study of Elizabeth Barrett Browning." Little, Brown, & Co.

_Dear Italy! The sound of thy soft name Soothes me with balm of Memory and Hope. Mine, for the moment, height and sweep and slope That once were mine. Supreme is still the aim To flee the cold and gray Of our December day, And rest where thy clear spirit burns with unconsuming flame._

_Thou human-hearted land, whose revels hold Man in communion with the antique days, And summon him from prosy greed to ways Where Youth is beckoning to the Age of Gold; How thou dost hold him near And whisper in his ear Of the lost Paradise that lies beyond the alluring haze!_

ROBERT UNDERWOOD JOHNSON.

_Great ideas create great peoples. Let your life be the living summary of one sole organic idea. Enlarge the horizon of the peoples. Liberate their conscience from the materialism by which it is weighed down. Set a vast mission before them. Rebaptize them._

MAZZINI.

_All parts array for the progress of souls: all religion, all solid things, arts, governments,--all that was or is apparent upon this globe, or any globe, falls into niches and comes before the procession of Souls along the grand roads of the universe.... Of the progress of the souls of men and women along the grand roads of the universe, all other progress is the needed emblem and sustenance._

WALT WHITMAN.

VII

THE MAGIC LAND

More than five hundred years have passed over the country of Dante since the death of his mortal part--years of glory and of shame, of genius and intolerable mediocrity, of turbulent liberty and mortal servitude; but the name of Dante has remained, and the severe image of the poet still rules the destinies of Italian generations, now an encouragement and now a reproach. The splendor of no other genius has been able to eclipse or dim the grandeur of Dante; never has there been a darkness so profound that it could conceal this star of promise from Italian eyes; neither the profanations of tyrants and Jesuits, nor the violations of foreign invaders, have been able to efface it. "_Sanctum Poetæ nomen quod nunquam barbaries violavit._"

MAZZINI.

The true life of Italy is not read in any record of contemporary facts or statistics. Mazzini once said of Dante, in an essay on the immortal poet, that "the life, the true life of Dante does not lie in the series of the material facts of his existence. The life of Dante consists in the sufferings and aspirations of his soul; in its dominant impulses; in the ceaseless development of the idea which was at once his guide, inspiration, and consolation; in his belief as a man and as an Italian." The real life of Italy is, by analogy, to be read in that atmosphere of aspiration and of noble purpose which characterizes the nation rather than in the material facts of its general progress at the present time. As a country Italy is young. It is still less than forty years since her unity was declared, and to merge the large number of separate States into one harmonious whole is a task requiring the evolutionary progress of time; for a nation, like a university, cannot be a matter of instantaneous creation. It must germinate and grow. The country that, previous to so comparatively a recent date as the year 1870, was, in the phrasing of Prince Metternich, "a geographical expression," can hardly be judged by present national standards after an existence of only thirty-seven years, although it need be said in no spirit of apology; for Italy is advancing in scientific development, in manufactures, and in the problems involved in civil and hydraulic engineering to a notable degree in the northern part. Milan and Naples are separated by far more than geographical distance. In modern progress Milan is divided by centuries from all Southern Italy.

Between Italy and the United States the _entente cordiale_ is not merely that of diplomatic and ceremonial courtesy, but of an exceptional degree of mutually sympathetic comprehensions. In noble ambitions and lofty purposes Americans and Italians are closely akin. In zeal for contemporary scientific progress, in an intense susceptibility to the glories of art, and in hospitality to all that makes for progress, both nations meet in mutual recognition. Of no people is it more deeply true than of Americans that "each man has two countries: his own and Italy." The average traveller sees this fair land with a breadth and thoroughness seldom called into requisition elsewhere. In England he is usually content with London, the tour of the cathedral towns and the lake region of the poets. France is summed up to him in Paris and in the chateaux of outlying districts. But Italy beguiles the traveller into every lonely foot-trail in the mountains; to every "piazza grande" of lonely hamlets, isolated on a rocky hillside; to every "fortezza" that crowns a mountain summit. The unexplored byways of Italy are magnetic in their fascination, and one special source of congratulation on the part of those fortunate tourists who travel with their own motor car is that they are thus enabled to penetrate into untrodden byways in Italy in a manner impossible to those who must depend entirely on the regulation railroad service. All lovers of Italy are devoted to these original tours of private exploration. A recent trip to Saracinesco, in the region of Tivoli, was made by Mrs. Stetson (Grace Ellery Channing) with her husband, and in a descriptive record of the little journey into an unfrequented mountain region this paragraph occurs:--

"Roused by 'an awful rose of dawn' which turned every solemn slope to strange amber and amethyst, we left that rocky eyrie next day, returning by way of Anticoli--beloved of artists. And if the ascent had qualified us for Alpine climbers, the descent qualified us as members of the Italian cavalry corps. Pictures of officers riding down the face of cliffs will never impress us again; we know now it is the very simplest of 'stunts.' Our way down was diversified by the tinkling of thousands of sheep-bells, by the far too close proximity of bulls to Maria's crimson headdress, which nothing in the world would induce her to remove, and by sundry meetings with relations, long-unseen friends, and strangers, from whom we culled the whole register of deaths, births, marriages, and happenings for a month past. At last, beside a little bridge near the railroad station, Leonardo addressed his ten-thousandth adjuration to Beppino, whose poor little legs trembled under him. It was no longer, 'Ah, sacred one!--don't you see Anticoli!'--or 'the rock,' or whatever it might be; now he said, 'Ah, sacred one!--don't you comprehend?--the Signora descends'--and Beppino looked distinctly pleased.

"Here we demanded the reckoning, skilfully evaded hitherto.

"'Well--a franc for each beast,--and half a franc for the room,--the rest was nothing--a _sciocchezza_.'

"A franc apiece!--half a franc!--were _we_ brigands that we should do this thing?"

This typical picture of idyllic days in Italy, enjoyed in the impromptu excursion and trip, reveals the delicacy of feeling and the sunny kindness that characterize the _contadini_ and which imparts to any social contact with them a grace and sweetness peculiar to Italian life. There are parts of Italy where it is still the Middle Ages and no hint of the twentieth century has yet penetrated. The modern spirit has almost taken possession of Rome; it is largely in evidence in Florence and even Venice, and it dominates Milan; but in most of the "hill towns" and in the little hamlets and lonely haunts where a house is perhaps improvised out of the primeval rock, the prevailing life is still mediæval, and only awakens on festa days into any semblance of activity.

Somewhere, away up in the hills, several miles from Pegli,--on the Mediterranean coast near Genoa,--is one of these sequestered little hill towns called _Acqua Sacra_. The name is obvious, indeed, for the sound of the "sacred water" fills the air, falling from every hillside and from the fountain of the _acqua sacra_ by the church. Pilgrims come from miles around to drink of these waters. Each house in this remote little hamlet is of solid stone, resembling a fortress on a small scale, and the houses cling to the hillsides like mosses to a rock. Though far up in the mountains, the hills rise around the hamlet like city walls, as if the life of all the world were kept outside. The unforeseen visit to these remote hamlets, suddenly chancing upon some small centre of happy and half-idyllic life, is one of the charms of tourist travel in this land of ineffable loveliness.

The approach to Italy, by whatever direction, by land or by sea, one enters, is one of magical beauty. Whether one enters from the Mediterranean or from the Adriatic, or by means of the Mont Cenis, the Simplon, or the St. Gothard pass, through the sublime mountain wall, each gateway is marvellous in attraction. Approaching from the seas that completely surround Italy except on one side, the almost undreamed-of splendor of Naples, Genoa, and Venice, as seen from off the shore, exceeds all power of painter or poet to reproduce. The precipitous coast of Sicily; the picturesque city of Palermo; the wonderful ruins of the Greek theatre on the heights in Taormina,--all enchant the tourist. To anchor off Naples, in the beautiful bay, serves the purpose of an hotel out at sea. It is like living in Venice--only more so! By the little rowboats one may go, at any moment, to Naples, and it is more delightful than passing the days in the city itself. For at night as one strolls or sits on deck what a picture is before the eye! All Naples, on her semicircular shores, with her terraced heights rising above, defined in a blaze of electric lights! Genoa, _la Superba_, is still more magnificent when seen from the sea; and Venice, rising dream-enchanted, completes the wonders of the approach by water.