Part 8
As the time drew nearer and nearer for leaving the Tuscan home where we had been so happy, Veronica began to manifest a certain solicitude, in consequence of our leisurely and unsystematic ways, lest we should have omitted to make Lamia acquainted with some cloister or bas-relief, some bit of quaint street architecture, or some hillside sanctuary, ignorance whereof might expose her to the reproach of a want of intelligent curiosity. But we found the omissions were few and unimportant, and this left us all the more free, during the now brief and regretful remainder of our sojourn, to pay farewell visits to the frescoes and altar-pieces, the monuments and statues, that had most engaged her affections. Where Giotto worked, where Savonarola preached, where Fra Angelico painted and prayed, where Michelangelo fought, where Dante sate, where Donatello slept, in death as in life not severed from his beloved Medicean patron, these and kindred spots had to be seen just once more. When one quits a place where one has been residing for some little time, one says good-bye to one’s friends; and these were, one and all, very dear friends to us, and we could not but take of them affectionate farewell. The _Luca della Robbia_ in the _Ospedale degli Innocenti_, the Perugino in the _Maddalena dei Pazzi_, the Fountain by Verrocchio in the cortile of the _Palazzo Vecchio_, the recumbent Bishop in _San Miniato_, the Mino da Fiesole in the _Badia_, the bronze David in the _Bargello_;—but, unless I have a care, I shall fall into the fault I have been trying to avoid, of troubling you with a catalogue of familiar names. There were favourite spots, too, to drive to once again, happily too numerous to cite, and too lovely for any one to be so foolish as to attempt to describe. Exception, however, shall be made of one of these, for I fancy it is but little known, and therefore has not become hackneyed. Accident made us acquainted with it, and design had often and often taken us there again. It was in a _podere_ some two miles or so outside the Porta San Niccolò, whence, over a wall lined with irises, one looks down the river immediately in front of one straight away to Florence, but sees nothing there save, through the feathery foliage of distant poplars, the cupola of the Duomo, Giotto’s campanile, and the Tower of the Palazzo Vecchio. Beyond, far beyond, are visible, on propitious days, the majestic peaks of the Carrara Mountains, and, a little farther towards the north, the snowy summits of the Apennines above Pistoia. It was a place that fascinated us, and we returned to it again and again. One evening, when the light was even exceptionally beautiful, but the air a little chill, and we had therefore, for Lamia’s sake, to curtail our enjoyment of it, I remember her exclaiming:
‘O, do let us stay. Even if it were deadly, it would be worth dying for. It may never be so beautiful again.’
That expresses a feeling which, I think, one often has in Italy. It is the intense beauty of certain moments, certain views, certain sunsets, that makes one declare one never before has seen anything so lovely, and dread lest on such loveliness one never more may gaze. A foolish fear; for to-morrow renews the radiance and raptures of to-day.
But the closing hours of the now lengthening days were always spent in the _loggia_, the garden, or the _podere_ of our Villa; and Veronica, who, so English at home, was here the most Italian of us all, would, whenever the weather permitted, arrange for us to have our evening meal _al fresco_, in the society of the roses and the nightingales. Lamia had, as you may suppose, picked up many a Tuscan _stornello_ and _canzone_, and would sing them to us, to the accompaniment of her guitar; and, between song and song, discourse would run on all the beauty and the wonders we had seen that day.
‘What is it,’ said Lamia, ‘that, more than anything else, constitutes the charm of Italy?’
‘Ancientness,’ said the Poet, ‘and an ancientness that never grows old. For Italy, notwithstanding its centuries of history, art, warfare, misfortune, remains perennially young. More than once, the rash have said, “Italy is dead.” Italy never dies. She has the gift of perpetual life; but, with all her indestructible freshness, she carries about her the dignity of bygone times and the majesty of tradition. The new is always more or less vulgar. Refinement is the work of time. You remember Aristotle’s definition of Aristocracy, Ancient riches. Italy has ancient riches, the riches of law, religion, poetry, and the arts, long established, and she has therefore what is most precious in aristocracy. She has ancient speech and ancient manners. Her mountains are necessarily ancient, the Soracte of Horace, the Alps of Hannibal. But her plains and valleys are equally so, for she has an ancient agriculture. We are sitting at this moment surrounded by a rural cultivation that is described with absolute accuracy in the _Georgics_, and again by Politian in his _Rusticus_, written on this very spot, and that has not changed since the days of Cincinnatus. Listen to that fellow singing among the olives. Virgil has described him,—_Canit fundator ad auras_,—and might be his contemporary. It is this far-backness, if I may coin a word to express my meaning, that sheds a glamour over everything in Italy, a far-backness, however, that endures and persists, that is with us and around us, and compels us to bend with reverence before it, as we must ever do before the parent Past we still have with us. In proportion as Italy parts with its Past, Italy will lose its charm. The temptation to do so in this age is great, and I fear it is not being sufficiently resisted.
‘Dear Poet,’ said Lamia, ‘will you forgive me if I object that I have sometimes been told, though I am sure most inaccurately, that I, for instance, am charming; and yet I am not ancient.’
‘Dear Lamia,’ he replied, ‘you are very ancient, and are under deep obligation to ancestors you never saw, and probably never heard of; and I hope you will be yet more charming for your visit to this old and captivating land. For my part, I always seem to miss something in people who have not fallen under its spell. You have succumbed to it entirely. I shall never weary, and I hope I shall never weary you, in extolling the power of the Past. Would the descant of those nightingales have the same charm for us, if they had not been singing thus for myriads of Mays? Spring is so irresistibly charming because it recalls and renews the Aprils that are gone. Time consecrates and confirms. The deeper our roots, the loftier our thoughts, and the sounder our hearts. I remember a great poet of this age saying to me that he could not see that, as some one had affirmed, he in his writings so much resembled Keats. “You are Keats’s own child,” I replied, “and are of noble parentage.” But indeed every great poet is the lineal descendant of every other great poet. At any given moment, what exercises most influence is, not the present, but the Past. I ventured, the other day, to observe that there are only two sorts of people, the noble and the ignoble. Dear Lamia, let us try to belong to the noble, since every one may be a member of that untitled aristocracy; so that, when we ourselves are, as some of us are gradually becoming, portions of the Past, we may influence beneficently an unborn Future.‘
‘There never was anything more untrue,’ said Lamia, who was quick to surmise the more personal meaning that underlay those closing words, ‘than the saying “_On n’est jeune qu’une fois_.” I have been old several times; but I always get young again.‘ ‘And you will do so very often, I dare say, for many years to come. Moreover, I like to think there is the youth of one’s youth, the youth of one’s manhood, and, finally, the youth of one’s old age. But, when one has reached this last, man’s capacity for rejuvenescence is exhausted.‘
Lamia rose from her seat, placed herself close beside him, and taking his hand, replied:
‘Dear Poet, even in my youngest moments, compared with you I am in my dotage.’ And I would at that moment have been any age you will, to be treated thus tenderly.
We made many expeditions of which I have not told you, just as we visited, again and again, churches, palaces, and dismantled monasteries I have not named. But Lamia particularly wished to see a Convent,—a Convent, that is to say, in the Italian signification, of monks, not disestablished, but allowed still to survive, with a certain number of its inmates, as a national monument. She had heard me speak of the attractive hospitality I had enjoyed in them in days gone by; and we selected for our monastic excursion a Convent in the Apennines not too remote from Florence, and the drive to which would take us through Gavinana, a spot none of us had ever visited. Does the word Gavinana suggest anything to you? Probably not; yet it was there that the liberties of Florence received their final extinction. Indeed I fancy that, of the thousands of people who nowadays visit the Tuscan Capital, many are unaware that, in the earlier part of the sixteenth century, it underwent a Siege whose incidents strongly resemble many that occurred during the siege of another Capital nearly thirty years ago. Only Florence is much more beautiful than Paris, and less suggestive of the horrors of war. Yet the Siege of Florence lasted ten months, or more than twice as long as that of Paris; its inhabitants underwent far greater hardships, and displayed much greater heroism. We might have been a little sceptical on those points had Florentine historians been our only authority for them. But the copious and impartial Reports of the Venetian Ambassadors who were in the Fair City at the time render doubt impossible, and establish the courage, pertinacity, and patience of the besieged against Emperor and Pope. All the villas within a certain radius of Florence were rased to the ground, lest they should furnish help and corn to the besiegers; and all its silver plate, both sacred and profane, was melted down to replenish the coffers of the Republic. It is the noblest, perhaps it is the one perfectly noble, incident in the story of Florence; and I sometimes have thought, and the Poet agrees with me, that Francesco Ferruccio, whose statue is among that series of famous Florentines outside the Uffizi, is its most heroic and effective figure. He would in all probability have saved Florence, had the timidity of some of his fellow-countrymen, and the treachery of others, allowed him; for he proposed to create a diversion by marching on Rome, and menacing it with another sack such as had recently taken place under the Constable Bourbon. His project was overruled, and he died fighting in the piazza at Gavinana; his only consolation, in his last moments, being that the Leader of the Imperial Army, the Prince of Orange, was also slain. ‘The ill-omened spot,’ says the historian of the Commonwealth of Florence, ‘lies within sight of the traveller as he passes, about a mile to the right of it, on his way from Pistoia to Modena. And not a peasant of those mountains, though ignorant as his yoke of dove-coloured oxen of all the history of his country from that day to this, not a goat-herd tending his flock by the roadside, not a grimy muleteer bringing down his string of charcoal-laden beasts from the forests of the Upper Apennine, will be unable to point out to the stranger the field on which, nearly four hundred years ago, Tuscan liberty was fought for and lost.’
Drinking our coffee, for which we paid an incredibly small sum, under the plane trees of the square where Ferruccio and Florence fell, we again discoursed on the arbitrary hazards of Time that made the City justly called Fair, and to which one is often disposed to apply what Ovid represents Helen as saying to her Grecian paramour:—
‘Apta magis Veneri quam sunt tua corpora Marti: Bella gerant alii; tu, Paris, semper ama,’
a place of arms, a city woeful and intrepid, the champion of freedom against Sceptre and Tiara.
‘Surely,’ said Lamia, ‘Dante would have forgiven Florence could he have lived to see that day. The times were grim, and the deeds austere enough even for one “who had seen Hell.” Would you not rather,‘ she continued, turning to the Poet, ‘have it said of you that you had seen Heaven?’
‘Remember,’ said Veronica, ‘Dante saw both.’
The twilight was deepening into dusk before we reached the Convent whither we were bound, for our driver had taken a wrong turning during the last few miles of our journey; and Lamia was quick to note, as characteristic of Italy, that, when inquiry put us on the right one, the directions given were, not as in England, according to signposts, but to little tabernacles or shrines at the parting of the ways: now of the Annunciation, now of Saint Agatha or Saint Barbara, now of Saint Francis of Assisi receiving the Stigmata. I am afraid her curiosity was more piqued than satisfied when we reached our bourne; for, though we were most piously welcomed, Veronica and she were not allowed to violate that portion of the Convent which is defended from female gaze by the word _Clausura_; and she not unnaturally, though quite inaccurately, imagined that she was not shown what was most worth seeing. The Poet and I were allotted sleeping-cells within the Monastery, but our companions, of course, had to pass the night in the _Foresteria_, or strangers’ quarter, outside, in charge of a lay-brother, and it was there we all had our truly ascetic supper. But the guests of Sallust never enjoyed one more; for our host, the Prior, was an ideal monk, majestic yet saintly of aspect, with long flowing beard, silky and snowy, measured manners, and paternally caressing voice. The Rules of his Order forbid any instrumental accompaniment either at Mass or the other Sacred Offices of the twenty-four hours; but he had always loved music for its own sake, and he had made for himself a primitive sort of spinette, on which he said he would play to us, for our further entertainment, when the lay-brother who was waiting on us had retired, and all the Confraternity were in their first deep sleep. The performance, like the instrument, was touching in its simplicity; and Veronica, wishing to make him some return, said that Lamia, too, was fond of music, and would, she was quite sure, sing to him if he cared to hear her. Even in the _Foresteria_, I fear, there was a touch of the profane in the suggestion; but he evidently could not resist the temptation thus presented to him, and begged Lamia to sing, but with not too loud and penetrating a voice. She at once broke into the wild and melancholy chant the Italian recruits used to sing in the days of Napoleon, when they were dragged from their homes to face the snows of Russia:—
‘Partir, partir bisogna, Dove commanderà il mio Sovrano.’
But Lamia got no further than those two lines; for our venerable host suddenly exclaimed, the colour mounting to his face, and the tears brimming in his eyes:
‘Stop! stop! _Mi monta la fantasia._’ And he went on to tell us how he had not heard that strain for five-and-forty years, and that it used to be sung by one whose caprice had caused him to abandon the world and assume the habit of Saint Bruno.
On our journey homeward, the following morning, Lamia asked:
‘How would you translate the words the dear old Prior used last night, _Mi monta la fantasia_?’
‘They are not easily rendered into another tongue,’ said Veronica, ‘for they mean so much in the original. But when he said, “the fantasy mounts and seizes hold of me,” he doubtless meant that your voice suddenly made him feel all he had felt five-and-forty years ago.‘
‘O, how delightful!’ said Lamia. ‘Then I forced the _Clausura_, after all.’
‘It is a pity,’ said Veronica, whose sane nature and active temperament render her a little intolerant of monasticism in any form, ‘that you could not break it down altogether, and so make an end of it.’
‘And yet,’ said the Poet, who has rather more indulgence for the weaknesses of human nature, perhaps because he shares them more, ‘I doubt if we have done with the motives, many and various, that once engendered and still foster monasticism. The strong, the valiant, the sensible, require no shelter from the rough usage of the world. But, as in the days of savage militarism, so in these of an almost equally pitiless industrialism, terror, timidity, indolence, mysticism, love of meditation, longing for silence, and a certain passive piety, make men fly the market-place for the cloister. When Dante, exiled from Florence, appeared at the Convent in the Apennines, and was asked by the monks who he might be, did he not answer, “One who is in quest of peace”? There is no second Dante, but there are many exiles in this modern world, and I fear their number every day increases. As the struggle for existence waxes fiercer and fiercer, I think I hear them, too, exclaiming, _Dona nobis pacem_.‘
‘Listening first to Veronica,’ said Lamia, ‘and then to you, I am forced to the conclusion that many things are intolerable which we cannot do without. Yet I confess a Convent of Nuns seems more natural than a Confraternity of Monks.’
‘More natural, perhaps,’ said the Poet, ‘but hardly so necessary. For, even in the very heart of the world, every good woman is more or less nunlike, by virtue of her purity, her reserve——’
‘And, I suppose,’ interrupted Lamia, ‘her obedience?’
Nothing disconcerted, he re-echoed the words: ‘And her obedience.’
‘Have you not, dear,’ asked Veronica, ‘confuted yourself by anticipation? It was a man, not a woman, was it not, that took leave of the Prior, who would fain have detained him, with the words—
‘Father, farewell! Be not distressed, And take my vow, ere I depart, To found a Convent in my breast, And keep a cloister in my heart.’
‘One is constantly confuting oneself,’ he replied.
‘How should it be otherwise?’ said Lamia. ‘Verse being the expression, not of the convictions, but of the emotions, poets cannot be taxed with inconsistency, though they contradict themselves a thousand times.’
‘Thank you, dear Lamia,’ he said. ‘You are the most ingenious of apologists. If ever I have to defend myself, you shall be my Portia.’
* * * * *
But the last day, the last night, and then the very morning of departure at length arrived, when Florence, with its gorgeous towers and cloud-capped palaces, was, for a time at least, to dissolve like the baseless fabric of a vision. Perfetta was in tears; Ippolito had a _mazzetto_ of carnations for us all; the _contadini_ desisted from their work to cluster in the garden in order to see us off with many gracious words and expressions of hope that next year we should return; and the entire household manifested by melancholy smiles their sorrow at our going. Pasquale, the _cameriere_, had come into my room early that morning with a doleful face, and, in reply to a renewed inquiry whether we could not help him to find another place, assured me that he would not care to serve anybody else; and he launched into touching eulogies of Veronica’s considerateness and universal capacity, of Lamia’s irresistible charm, of the genius of the Poet,—_Il Gran Poeta_, he called him, though utterly ignorant, I need scarcely say, of the very language in which that retiring person writes,—and of the thousand-and-one virtues which, finally, he ascribed to myself. If you think that he was insincere, because he in some degree exaggerated, I can assure you that you are mistaken. He believed it all.
‘No, no,’ he said. ‘_Ringrazio tanto la sua signoria_, but I could not serve any one else. _Riprenderò il mio antico mestiere_’ (I will return to my old calling).
‘And what may that be?’ I asked.
‘Do you not know?’ he said. ‘_Io son comico_’ (I am an actor).
The dear people we were leaving are all of them so much more or less histrionic, that Pasquale’s occasionally fine gestures had never struck me as singular or exceptional.
‘_Sì, Signore, son comico io_,’ he went on, ‘I am an actor, and have played at Lucca, at Fiesole, at Pisa, yes and at Siena. Once I was in the same cast with the stupendous tragedian, Salvini.’
‘Yes, a great actor, indeed,’ I said. ‘I once saw him in an Italian version of our English drama _Othello_.’
He was in his early morning dress, wearing no coat nor jacket, and having in his turned-up white apron my boot-trees, which he was just about to pack. But he drew himself up with much dignity, and, with the one disengaged hand suiting the action to the word, he said:
‘I, too, have played the part of Otello.’ And, without more ado, he recited, in his sonorous language, the lines:
Farewell the tranquil mind! farewell content! Farewell the plumed troop, and the big wars; That make ambition virtue! O, farewell!
And the earnestness with which he recited that pathetic passage completely submerged the sense of humour that was beginning to rise in me.
As we entered Florence, so did we quit it, leisurely, and without the disenchanting scenes of a modern railway station. We were to drive across the Apennines to Bologna, and, as we reached the last flower-stall near the Gate that looks thitherward, Lamia expressed a wish for one more flower. It was a lovely rose, the only one on a plant that occupied among the others the place of honour.
‘It is a pity to spoil the plant,’ said the woman, who was well known to us, for we had often halted to make purchases from her. ‘Will not another serve equally well?’
You will easily surmise Lamia’s reply. No rose in the world but that one would have satisfied her desire.
‘_Come vuole_, said the woman (‘be it as you wish’), and she severed the fair flower from its stalk.
‘How much is it?’ I asked, eagerly availing myself of the opportunity to make dear Lamia a parting gift from the City of Flowers.
‘Don’t trouble about it,‘ said the woman, ‘you can pay some other time.’
‘But there will be no other time,’ said Lamia, ‘for we are going away for good and all.’
‘_Dunque, non si paga. Addio, e buon viaggio!_‘was the reply. (‘In that case, you must not pay at all. Happy be your journey! Good-bye!’)
* * * * *