Part 16

There was an insuperable difficulty in the dead being buried in his own beautiful cemetery, which was unconsecrated ground, so the heir, the then Duke of Hamilton, had the sarcophagus deposited in the cemetery on the opposite side of the river. The grounds of the one laid out with so much loving care by the deceased, with their tower and exquisitely carved gateway and their finely wrought palings, the porphyry of the tower alone having been brought from Egypt at an expense of £50,000, were sold for £1500, and were about to be converted into a tea-garden for the Lansdown races held hard by.

These preliminaries got through, of course by the duke’s agents, preparations were made for the removal of the pictures and sculptures, but the executors of the will stepped in, and announced that those treasures were not to be given up until Mr. Beckford’s cemetery held his remains.

This was a cruel dilemma, for the property had to be repurchased at an enormous advance on the price paid; but it was done, and the terms of the bishop to consecrate the soil, previously declined, were acceded to. These were that the cemetery should become the property of the Church!

The game was thus cleverly won and profitably; the cemetery is fashionable, people pay high prices for being buried in such good company. Every one visits Beckford’s tomb, and the Church, in acquiring the freehold, will be thought by many to have done well for religion. But my mind is of a perverse nature, and is apt to wander. It sometimes comes across the word “infernal,” in relation to things on high, and is sometimes arrested, as by an erratic block, by the word “humbug,” but it would not like to see the two words in juxtaposition in reference to Church doings.

Beckford had desired that his sarcophagus should be placed on the summit of his tower, whence, should he open his eyes again, and be able to see through porphyry, he would behold Fonthill Abbey.

But this pleasure was denied him, and he only lies above the grass instead of below.

On the tomb one reads—

“Eternal Power, Grant me through obvious clouds one transient glimpse Of thy bright presence in my dying hour.”

After some weeks at Bath I went to Germany, staying with my daughter, Mrs. Dupré, at Stassfurt, where, underground, had been achieved one of Nature’s most wonderful geological operations. A tidal sea, once extending over many hundred square miles of Prussian Saxony, was gradually blocked out from its connection with the Baltic, and had evaporated, depositing its salts in the order of their solubility, but still replenished at high tide through countless ages, until at last, cut off from its connection with the main waters, it dried up, and during other countless ages became covered two hundred feet deep with soil. The first deposit in this vast bed of salts was common salt (chloride of sodium), a deposit so thick that it has been drilled to a depth of one thousand feet, and not yet pierced through. On the surface of this deposit is found a considerable bed of chloride of potash, with boracic salts, bromides, and others of great commercial value.

Stassfurt is an ancient village some twenty miles from Magdeburg. It has a fine old church, unwittingly founded on a rock of salt, or at least above one; not the same thing as a rock, for the miners have been under the church’s foundations, and the earth has quaked and the walls have been split and shaken, almost to falling. The stork has built its nest upon its tower from time immemorial, and is the sacred bird of Stassfurt.

And that vast salt bed, now a mine whose streets reach for miles under the town and country! By torchlight it glitters with reflected flame, surpassing in brilliancy all fairy land! There lies a dead sea, with salt enough to supply the world for ever.

Thirty or forty lofty chimneys are erected over it, and are, as new monuments, strangely marking the spot where a sea had laid buried for ages unknown.

This is in Prussian Saxony, whence came our invaders in the olden time. There is to be seen an old Saxon church in a village just outside the town; one descends into it by steps. A dust of ages, vagrant as the wind, but which loves to take shelter against walls, and to bury them as time goes on, has settled itself for the time to come. Churches exactly like this church are to be seen on the hills of Bath, with their Saxon tower. Inside it are the high pews and the gallery, at one end of which, on the right, near the pulpit, is the pew of the squire. It is old England before it migrated to our shores.

Thus our ancestors brought their institutions here; so we in turn take them with us to newer lands.

My son-in-law was Professor of Chemistry at the Westminster, in succession to the gifted Dr. Marcet, whose assistant he had been for some years. He resigned his place, and his brother Augustus Dupré was elected in his stead, while he went to Stassfurt to do chemistry on a larger scale, extricating tens of thousands of tons of potash from its chlorine. He was then the father of a baby, he has now two grown-up daughters and three grown-up sons.

I stayed several weeks at Stassfurt. My son Cecil was there under Dupré. He had been a student at the Westminster laboratory; he is now Chief Inspector of Explosives at Melbourne in Victoria.

LIX.

My daughter was very happy in her domestic life in Stassfurt. She was married from Lady Ripon’s house on Putney Heath, where a grand breakfast was provided for a large party of friends. Lady de Grey, Lord Goderich, Colonel Bertie Gordon, Mr. and Mrs. Dupré, my sons, George, Egmont and Henry, Mr. and Mrs. William Hake (my brother and his wife) and other members of my family and friends, with myself, were there, the good countess presiding with her usual kindness and grace.

The tables were hung round with festoons of grapes, beneath which the guests were seated.

Every one was struck by the likeness of Mr. Dupré to Bonaparte without any knowledge of the reason, which was that they had a common ancestor in the female line of Feisch, mother of the cardinal of that name. When Mr. Dupré was page to the King of Wurtemberg, Jerome Bonaparte, through this connection, the guard often presented arms as he passed, mistaking him for one of the royal house.

He belonged to an old French family, that of Dupré de St. Maur, with the rank of marquis, a title never entirely dropped, and to which my son-in-law now stands next in succession, though he may never use it.

There was once an event of moment to the Protestants of France, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes: this drove my son’s branch of the Duprés into Germany and another to England, whose descendants are settled in Buckinghamshire.

I went with all my family to the Harz, a mountain which is like a large purse full of uncoined money; it is said to contain every metal. Men whistle when they have nothing better to do, and they puff out their cheeks when they are hot. This they are taught by Nature: she whistles and behold a Vesuvius in full blast; she puffs out her cheeks and behold the Harz mountains.

In England no place is more than 100 miles from the sea; but except a strip of the Baltic all the salt water of Germany is inland, and where its waves spout out, the people have towns, which, like our horse-troughs, are called Watering Places. In Germany those who can afford the luxury of gradual suicide, caused by over-good drinking and eating, go there yearly to settle accounts with their system.

These towns have their pilgrims from many lands, who go as to Æsculapian Temples to repent of their Hoch: but their sins are very curious; they break out all over and all inside their bodies. There are reddish and purple sins; these do penance sometimes on the nose, sometimes on the large toes, and other joints; sometimes they blossom all over the skin. Then there are sins of the stomachic, hepatic, renal, and pulmonic kind, each symbolizing local contrition; and the penitents, with their sins thus upon them, go every season to drink of those holy waters, and some of them, for a time, are forgiven.

Midway between Stassfurt and Magdeburg there is a sort of park, called Schönebeck, where people go for an idle day. It is bounded by a noted salt-water evaporator which is a wall a mile long. There is an hotel, and stalls for the sale of ephemeral goods, as books, toys, and drinks, and a band plays all day the music of the best composers. George, who went with me by way of Hamburg, returned with me to England by way of Cologne and Brussels.

My Roehampton days were now over. After a stay in London, Brighton, and elsewhere, I went to Bath early in 1873, and spent the August of that year at Dover in company with my son Egmont; I then went to Paris, where my eldest son, Thomas St. Edmund, joined me, making the very naïve remark during our walks, that one learns a good deal of French out of doors. This I capped by saying that English, too, might be learnt on the shop-windows; but it was broken English, for the gold letters stuck on the glass, of “English spoken here,” often got loose, while some were missing. My next movement was through the Cenis Tunnel to Turin, where I met my youngest son, Henry, who was a student of chemistry at the University of Giesen, under Dr. Will.

After some stay at Turin we visited Genoa; passing the month of November there, during which I was bitten by mosquitos over the face in a manner expressive of small-pox.

LX.

The most pleasurable recollection of this period was a day spent at Nervi, ten miles from Genoa on the _Riviera Levante_.

The lovely bay of Nervi, on a sunny day, is enriched with every colour: the steep shores of black, veined with white, a magnesian limestone, worn by the waves into waves; the blue waters breaking over projecting rocks, curdling into white, while pools of foamy green fill the basins. It was here that I collected my colours and ideas for “The Painter” in “New Symbols,” which I wrote on returning to Genoa, a place not so attractive as some Italian cities, though the Palazzo Rosso, with its art collection, is never to be forgotten.

There is no sea coast worth visiting at Genoa, scarcely a bathing place; all occupied and spoilt by fortifications. Nevertheless we wandered among the vineyards and villas, our eyes doing honour to the one that had belonged to Paganini.

On a descending road we walked along a festooned vineyard, regarding the ripe fruit with longing eyes, for it was sultry weather, and our great contribution to it was thirst. At the bottom of the hill was a fruiterer’s shop, where a barrowful of grapes had just arrived, and we gained permission to eat. Our thirst was slaked and we asked what we owed in payment; it was a few coppers, and we took from our pockets at random, a good half-dozen times the amount demanded. For such small pay, we witnessed a rapture such as no stage exhibits.

On reaching the streets of the city we encountered a crowd, in the midst of which two men, a large and a small one, were wrestling in an agony of rage. The big man suddenly wrested a knife from the hand of the little one, and flung it far from him, pointing at it in triumphant scorn.

The little man, all over in a fury that actor never attained to, rushed to his house close by, imploring his wife, who was at the door, to give him another knife; but she refused, so the fight was over.

We have not forgotten the Via Nuova, that narrow street of palaces of which our Pall Mall is a resemblance; and we have not forgotten the statue of Columbus,—it was nearly opposite our hotel.

More of Genoa I do not care to note, except that the villas of various colours, red, blue, green, and yellow, surrounding it, look suited to the climate; that of Novello more picturesque than the shop in London where he gathered together all his money.

Henry toiled up the hill to inspect the cemetery.

It is a saying, rife at Genoa, that it takes three Jews to cheat one Genoese. The inhabitants are, certainly, a very business-like people.

The remembrance comes up in my mind that the cactus grows wild here on the old crumbling walls; as the houseleek does on our tiles.

We crossed the mountain that separates Genoa and Spezia—a picturesque journey, with frequent sea-views. The only conveyance was by Diligence, and there is danger; the driving becoming furious as soon as the descent into Spezia begins; nevertheless, we entered the town in safety.

Spezia has its charm; the old streets at the back, the new ones in front near the sea, the temple of Venus on the hill to the right of the shore, Lerici on the left, where Shelley died. But those marble hills that surround the place! As the sun sets, they and the sea become of one pink colour; as the sun sinks deeper, the brilliance quits the water, except where the little waves rise and just dip their crests into it once more.

We took the train to Florence, Henry getting out at Pisa to join me again.

I had returned to Florence after over forty years. Not a soul that I formerly knew was there; all had vanished, lost in the crowd of the absent or dead.

I felt like the last man! But I met with new friends there; the truest of all, Madame Mazzini, was almost the first of these. During my forty years’ absence she had been born, had married, and become a mother, and then a widow, afterwards to become the wife of an illustrious Italian, Signor Villari, senator, and now, in ’91, a member of the Government, as Minister of Education.

She, like her husband, a distinguished author, has been my sincere friend for twenty years.

There was nothing to take me to Florence, nothing but a longing that time could not extinguish, a longing to see again its palaces, its churches, its Palazzo Vecchio in its over-powering might of grandeur embossing architecture on the sky; the Palazzo Strozzi, so defiant of all that is plebeian; the Casa Ricarsoli, so graceful as almost to say a house may be of the fairer sex! The Duomo, the Campanile, not yet under a glass case, as Michael Angelo said playfully, it was worthy to be; and the Sacristy at its side. These and more I longed to see again, with a passion that impels the wanderer to return to his native land. And those delicious walks to Fiesole and Bellosguardo, whence, from summits, one gazes on Florence as on an enchanted city!

Then the Tuscans, with their bright intellects and fine faces, from prince to peasant; their gentleness towards the stranger; their melodious, grammatical enunciation of the one sweet language perfected in the course of ages out of the beautiful words handed down from Greece and Rome.

I had thus reached Florence by Mont Cenis, Turin, Alexandria, and Pisa. At Genoa I inquired of a peasant my way; he took me to the place I wanted, a steep ascent. I offered him a gratuity, which he refused, saying, “The signor is a stranger!” Forty years before, one dark night, I asked a Prince Corsini, not knowing whom he was, to direct me to the Via Maggio where I lived. He turned out of his path and escorted me home.

LXI.

It was in September, ’73; I had much worldly business on hand for present time, and much that was prospective. I was sixty-three years old, yet in my prime; for I felt as if what Montaigne said was my case: every man thinks he has twenty years more to live—and I have done it, so at eighty-three, I have yet twenty before me! Yet, four days ago, December 4, ’91, was the third anni-_re_-versary of my broken leg, which will imprison me (without hard labour, unless word-picking and hemp-picking are one) for the term of my natural life!

Henry’s stay with me in Florence was short, but he went over the galleries with me, and the walks, then returned to Germany, while I settled myself down in pleasant rooms on the Lungarno Acciajoli (No. 18), overlooking river, bridges, heights of Boboli, Bellosguardo, and St. Miniato, my new and cheerful winter home, the air bright, the temperature 68° F., sun shining all day on my delightful windows.

What walks I thence took; often to the Boboli Gardens, whence falls on the vision a superb view of the city with its various tints of brown and white, so chaste, so compact, as to look like a massive cameo!

And I walked to all the old places, to Fiesole and back, the walk of many hours, but enchanting all the way; now past the villa of Walter Savage Landor, now the Villa Palmieri, the scene of the Decameron.

Then the walk over the Viale, then the walk along the sweet, soft Certosa Road, the monastery now inhabited by a single monk, the caretaker of the past. These walks and many others made Florence an ideal native land.

Then I settled down to my table to take stock of my work. I had, while at Bath, received many reviews of my last volume, always favourable; and I now contemplated a further adventure.

During a visit to Kelmscott, I wrote “Reminiscence,” a poem describing the manor-house, the river, and surrounding scenery.

I took this to Florence with me, together with “Ecce Homo,” “The Exile,” and “Ortrud’s Vision;” there I added others, “The Painter,” “Michael Angelo,” and one or two besides, to my little store; and some I wrote on my return to London, the next year, making in all a dozen poems, which came out, not before 1876, as “New Symbols.”

My correspondence with Rossetti from Florence was constant; it was after his reading “The Painter” that he offered a suggestion to me to write “The Sculptor,” which I did, giving it the name of his idol, “Michael Angelo.”

This poem I sent to Rossetti in manuscript, and he was pleased to return me the following gracious reply, which I extract from a long letter.

“I read ‘The Sculptor,’ which may perhaps rank as the most masterly of your poems; some passages (as stanza three) having absolutely a new and valuable image in every couplet, and being as perfect in expression as words can make them. I found the poem still further a gainer on being submitted to the ordeal of _vivâ voce_ reading, on the occasion of Brown’s being here lately, when the whole was encored and several stanzas more than encored.”

I sketched out the “Birth of Venus” while in Italy; this time I had seen that imaginary drama acted, in the waters of Nervi. In reply to a copy I sent Rossetti of it, he remarked on two lines in the thirty-eighth stanza, where the goddess sees herself reflected in the water. “It is an idea so beautiful,” he said, “as to seldom occur to any poet during a lifetime.” The lines are—

“Under her rose-dipped feet, the mirror shows A form divine, enamelled in the sky.”

He wrote in exactly the same tone of a verse in “Michael Angelo,” the four last lines of stanza three.

Should the reader trouble himself to run his mind over the early stanzas he will recall the writer’s visit to Spezia, among the marble hills: before then he had no conception of the mountains themselves being of that precious stone; he had only pictured to himself the quarries whence it was drawn.

Mr. William Rossetti, in a review in the _Academy_, of 1886, was so complimentary as to call “Michael Angelo” “a sculptured poem.” The introductory lines preceding stanza one greatly pleased Dante Rossetti.

I visited the monument of the Duke d’Urbino in the Capella dei Medici, until I had well mastered Angelo’s greatest work, and interpreted and translated it into metaphoric thought. I went to the opera to set my thoughts to music, the language of verse.

LXII.

We are all musicians, not that we all compose or play—except on each other’s feelings. The nervous system is the one marvellous harmonium. Its strings are more in number than those of a thousand harps, and all that is most exquisite, most exalted, and beautiful, can be performed upon it with a vehemence that incites to merriment or rends the heart. It can receive and realize the concert of a thousand voices!

All this we experience in our intercourse of every day; at the sight of a beloved one, we extemporize some pleasing harmony.

But this human harp has not all its rich notes attuned and struck by others; it is more often Eolian, and spontaneously pours out its emotions in the solitude of its sorrow and its joy; and it is not always music set in words or confined to our own sphere of being. This the poet feels when, resting in his chamber, his spirit passes into that of others, drawn by a divine sympathy. It becomes a concert then with many others’ trials. The sufferings are reverberated within him, like the sound of distant music.

How easy is it in this way to enter another’s soul, to share in its tribulation, to sink as deeply into it as to reach its self-love, and learn how like it is to our own!

My friend Dr. Ewart, a physician now to St. George’s Hospital, and a distinguished writer on chest-affections, sent me a friendly letter to Professor Schiff of Florence, of which I availed myself largely. It was at that time, too, that Madox Brown sent me a letter to Colonel Gillum, at whose house I first met Madame Mazzini. Dr. Schiff had the lead in science on nerve-function, and I constantly attended his demonstrations. They were always performed on anæstheticized dogs. I learned much of him. He was greatly esteemed by the Florentine Government, by whom he was given apartments in the vacated convent of Sta. Annunciata, together with the extensive garden.

Professor Schiff was not a man of the Majendie kind who could drown all consciousness of animal suffering in the pleasure of reading science out of a living book; he was benevolent, and he guarded carefully against the creature on which he operated being alive to pain. But his emotional enemies were too strong for him; they were chiefly some English of fashion, and they got Capponi on their side; the most deservedly esteemed of Florentine nobles, whose residence was opposite to that of the professor.

This led to a correspondence between the neighbours, which ended for a time in Schiff convincing Capponi that no cruelty was practised, and that the operations on animals were painless.

However, Schiff had many animals; the municipality had ordered the police to supply the professor with all stray dogs, for which they could discover no owner. There was one dog amongst these that would bay the moon in spite of every effort to silence its superstitious moanings; and the enemy hearing this, interviewed Capponi again, and told him that Schiff was known to torture his dogs in the night season.

Capponi, in his palace opposite, had only too surely heard those midnight wailings.

The appointment of Professor Schiff to a chair of physiology and to the hospital was a Government one; his diagnosis of disease was regarded as remarkably rapid and successful. At his house, which was graced by Madame Schiff and her daughter, ladies of high culture, I met many interesting persons, one especially, a Moscow lady, who every year went to St. Petersburg, thence to Florence, thence to the Isle of Wight, where she had grandchildren at school and where she visited her friends, Lord and Lady Cottenham.

I speak of this lady because her love of our country almost amounted to a passion. The people, she said, were so kind; strangers would stop to help her from a railway carriage! Then the Isle of Wight, how lovely! Fuchsias flowering in the hedgerows, and climbing up the cottage walls!

As in Germany the “Vicar of Wakefield” is in every cottage, so, she said, is “Paradise Lost” in every Russian home.

I wish that I could give her name.

The last I heard of Professor Schiff was that his enemies had prevailed, and that he had returned to Berne, welcomed by his own people.

In the November of this year, I revised “Ecce Homo,” and composed the “Double Soul,” both of which are in “New Symbols.” I also wrote “Lucilla, the First Saved,” at that time, a favourite of the good and gifted Christina Rossetti.