Part 7

‘I am sure,’ said Lamia, apologetically, ‘you would not scold me if you had seen Perfetta’s delight, and heard her expression of it. If one gives a gown to one’s English maid, one receives a most respectful “Thank you, Miss,” and never hears another word about it; and, likely enough, she sells it, having no sentiment on the subject whatever. But Perfetta went into raptures over the poor little gown, hugged it, kissed it, spread it to the light, and has recurred to it again and again. Indeed, to listen to her is to have a lesson in Italian expletives of admiration. She would keep it, she said, for Feast days, not even for ordinary Sundays, unless perhaps she put it on, for the first time, on the festival of her patron Saint. Finally, she declared she would wear it, for the first time, at _Pasqua delle Rose_, and so you saw her in it yesterday. But, if I gave her the gown, I have likewise made you all a present of a most beautiful phrase; and, if you still are of opinion that I have left myself short of a frock, it is always open to any one to manifest gratitude by replacing it.‘

It was, indeed, an Easter, or, if you will, a Whitsuntide, of Roses. They were everywhere; clambering up the house, drooping from the roof, running along the walls, carpeting the ground, festooning themselves from elm to elm, interlaced with the cypresses, peering through porch and casement, covering stable and concealing shed, scaling the tallest and seemingly most inaccessible places, and thence falling down in untrained profusion, veritable cascades of colour. We talked of them from morning to night; we lived, moved, and had our being among them, left them only to go back to them, vowed these were the most beautiful,—no, those,—no, those others, and perpetually expressed ourselves in fickle and contradictory adoration. As Lamia wandered among them, she would break into song, chanting their praises, now in one tongue, now in another.

‘Roses crimson, roses white, Deadly pale or lovely blushing, Both in love with May at sight, And their maiden blood is rushing To and fro in hope to hide Tumult it but thus discloses. Bring the Bridegroom to the Bride! Everywhere are roses, roses.’

Then she would remember snatches of Lorenzo’s _Canzone a Ballo_, ‘_Ben venga Maggio_,’ written in the local dialect of the time, and improvise for them a suitable strain.

‘E voi, donzelle a schiera, Con li vostri amadori, Che di rose e di fiori Vi fate belle, il Maggio, Che è giovane e bella, Deh non sie punto acerba, Che non si rinnovella L’ età come fa l’ herba. Nessuna stia superba. Al’ amadore, il Maggio.‘

Then she would revert to her own tongue, in its paraphrase of the pagan song the _Compagnacci_ used to troll in the days of Savonarola, when they wanted to protest against the austerity of his followers and the Burning of the Vanities.

‘Every wall is white with roses, Linnets pair in every tree; Brim your beakers, twine your posies, Kiss and quaff ere Springtime closes; Bloom and beauty quickly flee.’

If we drove down to Florence, we drove along roads that were avenues of roses; and, in the Fair City itself, we forget to look at palace, or façade, or bridge, absorbed in gazing on the white and yellow Banksias that hung in bunches and clusters over intramural garden-walls. But, as the year expanded and deepened in beauty, we grew more and more unwilling to stir from the enchanting surroundings of the villa itself, unless it were to wander in other _poderi_ and among other vineyards, or to make expeditions that took us uninterruptedly through a world of radiant newness. Lamia did not now inquire how we proposed to employ ourselves, since being alive was in itself occupation enough. Lest, however, as she said, Veronica’s conscience should prick her for so much time passed in the mere delight of doing nothing, she read us the following passage written by Lorenzo de’ Medici, and which she said she intended to recite to a larger audience whenever she delivered those lectures in the _Sala Dante_.

‘What can be more worthy of desire to a well-regulated mind than the enjoyment of leisure with dignity? That is what all good men wish to attain, but what great men alone accomplish. In the progress of public affairs we may indeed be allowed to look forward to a period of rest; but no repose should totally seclude us from attention to the concerns of our country. I cannot deny that the path it has been my lot to tread has been arduous and rugged, full of danger, and beset with treachery; but I console myself with the thought of having contributed to the welfare of the State, the prosperity of which now rivals that of any other, however flourishing. Neither have I been inattentive to the interests and advancement of my family, having always proposed for my imitation the example of my grandfather Cosimo, who watched over his public and his private concerns with equal vigilance. Having now attained the object of my cares, I trust I may be allowed to enjoy the sweets of leisure, to share in the reputation of my fellow-citizens, and to exult in the glory of my native city.’

‘The passage is very interesting,’ said the Poet, ‘and serves to strengthen one’s impression of the sanity and completeness of Lorenzo’s talents. But is it not also another contribution to the vanity of human wishes and the fatuity of human self-complacency? I do not think Lorenzo ever attained to that enjoyment of dignity with leisure of which he speaks; and assuredly he had not long been dead before the glory of his native city, in the sense in which he used the phrase, passed away.‘

‘If one is to believe Politian,’ I said, ‘either the famous death-bed colloquy with Savonarola never took place, or it left but little impression on the dying man.’

‘That is a story,’ said the Poet, ‘one would part with unwillingly. But what is it that Politian says?’

‘That to judge by Lorenzo’s behaviour, and that of his attendants, when he was dying, you would have thought it was they who momentarily expected that fate, and he alone that was exempt from it.‘

‘There is no tomb nor inscription, is there,’ asked Lamia, ‘to mark the place that received his ashes, while his unworthier successors have a sumptuous monument designed by Michelangelo, whom in the budding days of his genius Lorenzo used to place, out of respect for his talent, above his own sons at table?’

‘I suppose,’ said Veronica, ‘he was paid for the monument he executed, and could not execute the one the cost of which there was no one to defray. But do not let us forget that what he felt concerning the contrast between the earlier and the later Medici is for ever embodied in his famous quatrain. Repeat it to us, Lamia.’

‘With pleasure, if I can.‘

‘Grato m’ è il sonno, e più l’ esser di sasso, Mentre che il danno e la vergogna dura. Non veder, non sentir, m’ è gran ventura: Però, non mi destar. Deh! parla basso.‘

‘How would one translate it?’

‘Translation is a difficult craft,’ said the Poet; ‘but, after visiting San Lorenzo again the other day, I could not resist trying to render those noble lines into our own tongue.

‘Nay, let me sleep, or, best, be stone or steel, While still endures this infamy of woe. My one sole bliss is nor to see nor feel: So, wake me not; and, lest you should, speak low.’

‘How utterly out of place,’ said Lamia, ‘a character like Michelangelo seems in Florentine history! whereas Lorenzo is its very type and representative.’

‘Do you not forget,’ said Veronica, ‘that perhaps the three most austere human figures known to us were Florentines, either by birth or by adoption: Michelangelo, Dante, and Savonarola.’

‘That only makes it all the more strange,’ I said.

‘But why?’ said the Poet. ‘Have we not, in these days, succumbed too readily to the notion that we are the creatures of our surroundings, and what is called our _habitat_? And is not that theory a mere _ex-post-facto_ explanation that explains nothing? Who would ever have thought of predicting that any of the three great Puritans you have named would be associated with Florence, and the greatest of the three be born and bred in the very heart of her? Must we not look elsewhere for the explanation?’

‘Know, Nature, like the cuckoo, laughs at law, Placing her eggs in whatso nest she will; And when, at callow-time, you think to find The sparrow’s stationary chirp, lo! bursts Voyaging voice to glorify the Spring.‘

‘In the same way characters, austere or the reverse, make their appearance in the most unlikely places. We hear too much, I think, of the Spirit of the Age. Shall we not rather believe that the Age is what great Spirits make it?’

‘There,’ said Veronica, ‘do you not press your own theory too far? Without for one moment denying that the sudden appearance of great characters, or the place where they appear, is not to be foretold, one can hardly help feeling that Dante, Savonarola, and Michelangelo, in consequence of something adverse in the Florentine character, did not succeed in making Florence what they would fain have made her.’

‘Truly great characters,’ said Lamia, ‘always fail. Only second-rate people succeed. For my part I am very glad of it, for nothing is so disappointing as failure,—except success.’

‘There is a good deal in what you say,’ I was rather surprised to hear the Poet reply. ‘But perhaps we have all, and myself most of all, drifted into a vein of exaggeration. I was betrayed into it by the excessive claim which it seems to me many nowadays advance for Science, as compared with other sources of instruction and helps to life. Our debt to Science is great. At the same time, it has its limits, and I cannot think it is the greatest of our obligations. Do you remember that profound saying of Pascal, “_La science des choses extérieures ne me consolera pas de l’ignorance de la morale au temps d’affliction, mais la science des mœurs me consolera toujours de l’ignorance des sciences extérieures_”? Such a line, for instance, as that of Shakespeare,

“In Nature there’s no blemish but the mind,”

is more deeply and enduringly helpful than steam-engines, electric lights, or anæsthetics. One can, in case of necessity, dispense with tramways and telephones; but we cannot dispense with right thinking and right feeling. The material discoveries of the Age do it much honour; but man’s triumph over matter is most nobly displayed when he triumphs over the matter of which he is himself composed; when he ignores physical pain, and tramples on his non-spiritual passions. Science is the language of the Intellect, Literature of the Soul; and Poetry, the highest expression of Literature, does for language, and sometimes for life, what the Soul does for the body, and what this glorious Italian sun does for mountain and plain: it spiritualises matter. Let me add, lest I should seem too partial to the particular art I practise so imperfectly, that this is true of all imaginative Art; and, far from fearing lest Science should sap and supersede it, I trust and believe that Art will ever remain its complement, and, where necessary, its corrective.‘

‘Do you consider Italians,’ asked Lamia, ‘artistic or scientific, material or spiritual?’

‘They are both, surely,’ he replied. ‘But, if we took the modern Florentine as the Italian type, I fear we would have to reply they are rather too prone to worship material science. The artistic faculty in them seems almost extinct, save for purposes of imitation; and, even when they imitate the art of the past, they do so without any discrimination between the good and the bad. But in railways, telegraphs, telephones, tramways, they take inexhaustible delight. They have disfigured much of Florence, and most of Rome, in their determination not to lag behind in the general march of what is termed material progress.’

‘Is it not,’ suggested Veronica, ‘that they are essentially a practical race? When the world first took to commerce, the Florentines became great merchants and great bankers. When Popes and Princes posed as patrons of architecture, sculpture and painting, they produced palaces, statues, and pictures.’

‘Just so,’ said Lamia; ‘and now that the whole world has taken to travelling, Representative Institutions, and Music Halls, they have Circular Tours and a popular Parliament, both of which they work exceedingly badly, and a _Caffè Savonarola Spettacolo Diverso_, a piece of profanation for which I confess I should like to smack them.’

‘There is a good deal of vulgarity,’ I ventured to plead, ‘in modern life, and in compliance with the theory you have all been pressing, they are vulgar accordingly. But would it not be more indulgent, and equally true, to say that Italy is the one country, and the Italians are the one race, whose vitality is inexhaustible? They have been well before the world, if you will pardon that expression, for more than two thousand five hundred years; and, during all that period, they have never altogether dropped out of sight. Neither do they now appear in the least disposed to retire into private life, or to preserve their ruins, however much some of us would like them to do so, for the satisfaction of our romantic feelings. Who would have believed, asked Saint Jerome fifteen hundred years ago, that Rome would ever be sunk so low that, at the very seat of its Empire, it would be reduced to fight, not for glory, but for self-preservation. Yet what do we see to-day? Rome, not only safe against foreign assault, but, with the aid of railways and Maxim guns, meditating new triumphs and new glories.’

‘That,’ said the Poet, and I felt much flattered by his approval, ‘is the more generous, and therefore the more just way of putting it. The Italians have a great Past, which they refuse to forget. It still continues to animate their ambition, and forbids them to rest satisfied with that _dolce far niente_ with which they once were reproached. When the period of the Renaissance came to an end, Italy might have seemed to say, in the words of Nero, _Qualis artifex pereo_, and to perish most artistically. But Italy was _not_ dead, as she has shown so clearly during the last thirty years. One’s only regret is that the existing type of national greatness is so costly, that Italians have to pay a desperately heavy price for refusing to exist without it.‘

‘People,’ said Lamia, ‘frequently complain of the excessive loads Italian carters expect their horses and their mules to draw. But the whole of Italy seems to me to be suffering from the same infliction.’

‘I fear,’ observed Veronica, ‘there is much truth in what you say. Only yesterday I remonstrated with the driver of the carriage I had hired to bring me back to the Villa, because his horse seemed in a shockingly poor condition. His answer was, “_Campa come me_,—he fares as I do. When I have plenty, he has plenty. When I have little, there is little for him also. When there are more _forestieri_, he will have more oats.”‘

‘Let us have a carriage apiece every afternoon,’ said Lamia, ‘and do what we all shall hate, drive round and round the _Cascine_ from five to seven. Only, in that case, I _must_ have that new gown.’

* * * * *

‘A firefly! A firefly!’

It was Veronica, invariably the most observant of us, whose voice called to us to welcome the fairy visitor, whose arrival is as delightful and momentous an event in Italy as the wing of the first swallow, the call of the first cuckoo, or the note of the first nightingale, in England. We were all on the alert in a moment, calling in return:

‘Where? Where?’

It was a single, solitary firefly, for one may say of fireflies as of primroses:

First you come by ones and ones, Lastly in battalions,

and it moved and twinkled in the deepening twilight, among the olive-trees, a miniature and terrestrial planet, having no fixed orbit. I need scarcely say that this was some days before _Pasqua delle Rose_, though Whitsuntide happened to be an early one; and, the following night, we saw three, and, the night after, seven. Then, for May can be capricious in Tuscany as elsewhere, the weather was not propitious for them. But, by the time the moon was nearly at full, they were plenteous as stars in the Milky Way; and while they flitted and glistened among the darkening leaves, the nightingales rejoiced and enlivened each other with the song that an ancient story and inherited association have transformed for us into a strain of imaginary sadness. Life offers no more enchanting combination of sensations than fall to one’s lot on a warm Italian night in May, when moonlight, fireflies, and nightingales weave their concerted charm; and, night after night, we repaired to the same antique marble seat, where we liked to think Lorenzo and his associates had often sat, in front of the same dark silent cypresses, and drank in the same sweet, grave, harmonious delights. Perhaps you think us a company of selfish Hedonists, wholly given up to pleasurable sensations, poor weak copies of our Pagan Renaissance predecessors on the self-same spot? Whether that be true or not of some of us, I will not undertake to say. But certainly it is not true of Veronica, nor yet, I think, of Lamia. Indeed, speaking generally, I think one ought to entertain one’s friends with a record of one’s happiness rather than with a recital of one’s woes; but it does not follow, does it, that there is no pathetic minor in one’s life because one is not always sounding it? Indeed, amid all the enchantments of that Italian season when Spring and Summer are indistinguishable, we had been conscious of the shadow of pain which is cast by the surely approaching extinction of a young life in one’s own immediate precincts; and the shadow was all the darker because the season was so bright. Ilaria, the youngest and comeliest of the daughters of our _contadini_, whose acquaintance you perhaps remember our first making, had, we were assured, till within a twelvemonth ago, more than justified her pretty name by the joyousness of her ways. But there was a canker in the bud, which thus was destined never to open fully to the meridian of life; and, shortly after our arrival, her figure was no longer seen among the olives, or her voice heard among the vines. Veronica was much troubled by the utter lack of creature comforts in the spacious _casa colonica_, or farmhouse, where Ilaria was patiently awaiting the end, though in reality their absence was only part of that rudimentary simplicity of existence which is universal among a people untainted by Northern ideas of luxury. She and Lamia were unremitting in their visits, their nursing, and their solicitude. But these proved unavailing; and _Pasqua delle Rose_ had to spare some of its luxuriant blooms for the grave of poor Ilaria. In the simple rustic household where she had left a vacant place, we liked to think that, in the daytime at least, the continual demands of Nature, in her busiest and most growing season, on the energy and co-operation of Man, diverted their thoughts somewhat from the missing figure; but, when we met and wished them good-day in the _podere_, tying the vines, training the _pomi-d’oro_, or cutting the sweet green fodder, that smile of which I once spoke as invariably accompanying their salutations for awhile vanished from their faces, and at nightfall we knew they were brought into undistracted consciousness of their bereavement. We grieved for them, and felt, moreover, a separate grief of our own; and neither the luminous May moon, nor the fairy-flitting fireflies, nor the silvery fluting of the nightingale, could wean us from the gravity of our thoughts. Even the purest and most generous sympathy borrows something of its tenderness, I suppose, from the knowledge that we are one and all subject to the dispensation of grief, and that those who console to-day may themselves need to be consoled to-morrow; and this is peculiarly so with the advent of the shadow of death, from which not even the strongest nor the most sanguine can hope to escape. Thus, without saying it, we were all, I suspect, musing on our common mortality, and thinking how the continuance of the deepest and dearest of our joys depends on the favour and forbearance of Heaven.

But the Poet has a theory, which we have all more or less adopted, and which he generally expresses by the words, ‘Cheerfulness is the most serviceable form of human charity’; and he never, if he can prevent it, permits us to linger over-long in the fruitless gloom of sentimental sorrow. I think that was why, on the fourth evening after we had strewn the roses on Ilaria’s grave, he recited to us, uninvited,—an unusual thing with him,—the following consolatory lines:—

WHEN I AM GONE

When I am gone, I pray you shed No tears upon the grassy bed Where that which you have loved is laid Under the wind-warped yew-tree’s shade. And let no sombre pomp prepare My unreturning journey there, Nor wailing words nor dirges deep Disturb the quiet of my sleep; But tender maidens, robed in white, Who have not yet forgotten quite The love I sought, the love I gave, Be the sole mourners round my grave. And neither then, nor after, raise The bust of pride, the slab of praise, To him who, having sinned and striven, Now only asks to be forgiven, That he is gone.

When I am gone, you must not deem That I am severed, as I seem, From all that still enchains you here, Throughout the long revolving year. When, as to Winter’s barren shore The tides of Spring return once more, And, wakened by their flashing showers, The woodland foams afresh with flowers, You sally forth and ramble wide, I shall walk silent at your side, Shall watch your mirth, shall catch your smile, Shall wander with you all the while, And, as in many a bygone Spring, Hear cuckoo call and ousel sing. And, when you homeward wend, along A land all blithe with bleat and song, Where lambs that skip and larks that soar Make this old world seem young once more, And with the wildwood flowers that fill Your April laps deck shelf and sill, I shall be there to guide your hand, And you will surely understand I am not gone.

When Summer leans on Autumn’s arm, And warm round grange and red-roofed farm Is piled the wain and thatched the stack, And swallows troop and fieldfares pack; When round rough trunk and knotted root Lies thick the freshly-fallen fruit, And ‘mong the orchard aisles you muse On what we gain, on what we lose, Now vernal cares no more annoy, And wisdom takes the place of joy, I shall be there, as in past years, To share your steps, to dry your tears, To note how Autumn days have brought Feelings mature and mellow thought, The fruitful grief for others’ smart, The ripeness of a human heart. And, when the winds wax rude and loud, And Winter weaves the stark year’s shroud, As round the flickering household blaze You sit and talk of vanished days, Of parent, friend, no longer nigh, And loves that in the churchyard lie, And lips grow weak, and lids grow wet, Then, then, I shall be with you yet, Though I seem gone.

* * * * *