Part 9

Interval I I go to the refreshment _foyer_ to see life. And now I can perceive that quite a crowd of people has been hidden somewhere in the nooks of the tremendous theatre. The large _caffé_ is crammed. Of course, it is vaulted, like everything in Florence. The furniture of the caffé is strangely pathetic in its forlornness: marble-topped mahogany tables, and mahogany chairs in faded and frayed crimson rep. Furniture that ought to have been dead and buried long ago! The marble is yellow with extreme age and use. These tables and chairs are a most extraordinary survival; in a kind of Italian Loins Philippe style, debased First Empire; or it might be likened to earliest Victorian. Once they were new; once they were the latest thing. For fifty years perhaps the management has been meaning to refurnish the _caffé_ as soon as it could afford. The name of the theatre has been changed, but not those chairs nor that marble. And conceivably the sole waiter, gliding swiftly to and fro with indestructible politeness, is their contemporary. The customers are the equivalent of a music-hall audience in these isles. They smoke, drink, and expectorate with the casualness of men who are taking a rest after Little Tich. They do not go to the opera with prayer and fasting and the score. They just stroll into the opera. Nor does the conductor, nor do the players, have the air of high priests of art who have brought miracles to pass. And I know what those two sopranos are talking about upstairs. Here opera is in the bones of the rabble. It is a tradition: a tradition in a very bad way of decayed splendour, but alive yet.

For the second act the auditorium is brighter, and fuller, though the total receipts would not pay for five minutes of Caruso alone. The place looks half full and is perhaps a third full. Behind me a whole series of first-tier boxes are occupied by a nice, cheerful, chattering shop-keeping class of persons, simple folk that I like. A few soldiers are near. Also there is a man next but one to me who cannot any longer deprive himself of a cigarette. He bows his head and furtively strikes a match, right in the middle of the theatre, and for every puff he bows his head, and then looks up with an innocent air, as though repudiating any connection with the wisp of smoke that is floating aloft. Nobody minds. The curtain rises on the interior of the Temple, a beautiful and solid architectural scene, much superior to anything in the first act, whose effect was rich and complex without being harmonious. The vestal is attending to the fire. When the military uniform unostentatiously enters, I feel that during an impassioned dialogue she will go and let that fire out. And she does. Such is the second act., I did not see the third. I shall never see it. I convinced myself that two acts of Spontini were enough for me. It was astonishing that even in Florence Spontini had not been interred. But clearly, from the efficiency, assurance, and completeness of its production, _La Vestale_ must have been in the Florentine _répertoire_ perhaps ever, since its composition, and a management selling seats at two lire finds it so much easier to keep an old opera in the _répertoire_ than to kick it out and bring in a new one. I had savoured the theatre, and I went, satisfied; also much preoccupied with the financial enigma of the enterprise, where indeed the real poetry of this age resides. Whence came the money to pay the wages of at least a couple of hundred skilled persons, and the lighting and the heating and the rent, and the advertisement, and the thousand minor expenses of such an affair?

When I reached the abode of the ladies it was all dark and silent. I rang, intimidated. And one of those young and beautiful girls (no, not so young and not so beautiful, but still--) in her exotic English attire opened the door. And with her sleepy eyes she looked at me as if saying: “Once in a way this sort of thing is all very well, but please don’t let it occur too often. I suffer.” A shame! And I crept contrite up the stairs, and along passages between hidden rows of sleeping ladies. And there was my Baedeker lying on the night-table, and not a word in it about Florentine opera and the romance thereof.

*****

Rain still! Florentine rain, the next morning, steady and implacable! They come down to breakfast, those fifty ladies; not in a cohort, but in ones and twos and threes, appearing and disappearing, so that there are never more than half a dozen hovering together over the white and almost naked tables. They glance momentarily at the high windows and glance away, crushing by a heroic effort of self-control, impossible to any but women of the north, the impulse to criticise the order of the universe. Calm, angular, ungainly, long-suffering, and morose, Cimabue might have painted them; not Giotto. Their garb is austere, flannel above the zone and stuff below; no ornament, no fluffiness, no enticement; but passably neat, save for the untidy, irregular buttoning of the bodice down the spine. And note that they are fully and finally dressed to be seen of men; all the chill rites have been performed; they have not leapt straight from the couch into a peignoir, after the manner of Latin women--those odalisques at heart! They are astoundingly gentle with each other, cooing sympathetic inquiries, emitting kind altruistic hopes, leaning intimately towards each other, fondling each other, and even sweetly kissing. They know by experience that strict observance of a strict code is the price of peace. In that voluntary mutual captivity, so full of enforced, familiar contacts, the error of a moment might produce a thousand hours of purgatory.... A fresh young girl comes swinging in, and with a gesture of which in a few years she will be incapable, caresses the chin of her desiccated mamma. And the contrast between the two figures, the thought of what lies behind the one and what lies before the other, inured so soon to this existence--is poignant. The girl perceptibly droops in that atmosphere; flourish in it she cannot. And the smiles and the sweetness continue in profusion. Nevertheless I feel that I am amid loose nitro-glycerine: one jar, and the whole affair might be blown to atoms, and the papers would be full of “mysterious fatal explosion in a _pension_ at Florence.” The danger-points are the jampots and the honey-pots and the marmalade-pots, of which each lady apparently has her own. And when one of them says to the maid (all in white at this hour, as is meet): “This is not my jam--I had more,” I quake at the conception of the superhuman force which restrains the awful bitterness in her voice. A matter of an instant; but in that instant, in that fraction of an instant, the tigress has snarled at the bars of the cage and been dragged back. It is marvellous. It is terrifying.

We talk. We talk to prove our virtuosity in the nice conduct of the early meal. I learn that they have been here for months, and that they will be here for months. And that next year it may be Rome, or more possibly Florence again. Florence is inexhaustible, inexhaustible.

I mention the opera. I assert that there is such a thing as an opera.

“Really!” Politeness masking indifference.

I say that I went to the opera last night.

“Really!” Politeness masking a puzzled, an even slightly alarmed surprise.

I say that the opera was most diverting.

“Really!” Politeness masking boredom.

The opera is not appraised in the guide-books. The opera is no part of the official museum. Florence is a museum, and nothing but a museum. Beyond the museum they do not admit that anything exists; hence nothing exists beyond it. They do not scorn the rest of Florence. The rest of Florence simply has not occurred to them. Pride of the Medicis, bow before this pride, sublime in its absolute unconsciousness!

*****

That morning I made my way in the rain to the Strozzi Palace, which palace is for me the great characteristic building of Florence. When I think of Florence, I do not expire in ecstasy on the syllables of Duomo, Baptistery, or Palazzo Vecchio, or even Bargello. The Strozzi Palace is in my mind. Possibly I merely prefer it to the Riccardi Palace because I cannot by paying fivepence invade it and add it up. The Strozzi Palace still holds out against the northern hordes. Filippo Strozzi, as to whom my ignorance is immaculate, must have united in a remarkable degree the qualities of savagery, austere arrogance, and fine taste; otherwise he would never have approved Maiano’s plans for this residence and castle. The dimensions of it remind you of the Comédie Humaine, and it carries rectangularity and uncompromising sharpness of corners to the last limit. In form it is simply a colossal cube, of which you can only appreciate the height by standing immediately beneath the unfinished roof-cornice, the latter so vast in its beautiful enlargement of a Roman model that nobody during five hundred years has had the pluck to set about and finish it. Then you can see that in size the Strozzi ranks with cathedrals, and that the residential part of it, up in the air, only begins where three-story houses end.

To appreciate its beauty and its moral you must get away from it, opposite one of its corners, so as to have two _façades_ in perspective. The small arched windows of the first and second storeys are all that it shows of a curve. Rather finicking these windows, the elegant trifling of a spirit essentially grim; some are bricked up, some show a gleam of white-painted interior woodwork, and others have the old iron-studded shutters. The lower windows are monstrously netted in iron to resist the human storm. The upper windows may each be ten feet high, but they are mere details of the _façades_, and the lower windows might be square port-holes. See the two perspectives sloping away from you under the tremendous eaves, a state-entrance in the middle of each! See the three rows of torch or banner holders and the marvellous iron lanterns at the corners! Imagine the place lit up with flame on some night of the early sixteenth century, human beings swarming about its base as at the foot of precipices. Imagine the lights out, and the dawn, and the day-gloom of those ill-lighted and splendid apartments. Imagine the traditional enemies of the Medicis trying to keep themselves warm therein during a windy Florentine winter! Imagine, from the Strozzi Palace, the ferocious altercations, and the artistic connoisseurship, and the continuous ruthless sweating of the common people, which made up the lives of the masters of Florence--and you will formulate a better idea of what life was than from any church! This palace is a supreme monument of grim force tempered by an exquisite sense of beauty. With the exception of an intervening cornice which has had a piece knocked out of it, and the damaged plinth, it stands now as it did at the commencement. Time has not accepted the challenge of its sharp corners. It might have been constructed ten years ago by Foster and Dicksee.

I go up to one of the state entrances and peep in, shamefacedly. For it is a private house. At the far end of the archway is a magnificent iron grille, and I can see a delicately arched courtyard, utterly different in style from the exterior, fruit of another brain; and beyond the courtyard, a glimpse of a fresco and the vista of the state entrance in the opposite _façade_. At each corner of the courtyard the rain is splashing down, evidently from high open spouts, splashing with a loud, careless, insolent noise, and the middle of the courtyard is a pool continuously pricked by thousands of raindrops. The glass of the large lamp swinging in the draught of the archway is broken. A huge lackey in uniform strolls in front of the grille and lolls there. I move instinctively away, for if anybody recoils before a lackey it is your socialist.

Then I see a lady hurrying across the square enveloped in a great cloak and sheltered beneath an umbrella. She makes straight for the state entrance, and passes me, dripping up the archway. I say to myself:

“She belongs to the house. Now I am going to see the gates yield. The lackey was expecting her.” And I had quite a thrill at sight of this living inhabitant of the Strozzi Palace.

But not She went right up to the grille, as though the lackey was in prison and she visiting him, and stopped there and stared silently into the courtyard. The lackey, dumbfounded and craven, moved off. She had only come to look. This was her manner of coming to look. I ought to have divined by the solidity of her heels that she was one of ours; not one of my particular band at breakfast, but in Florence there are dozens upon dozens of such breakfasts every morning, and from some Anglican breakfast she had risen.

*****

Our breakfast took place in a palace. Not the Strozzi, not nearly so large nor so fine as the Strozzi, but a real Florentine palazzo. It has been transformed within to suit the needs and the caprices of those stern ladies. They have come, and they have come again, and they have calmly insisted, and they have had their will. Hygienic appliances authentically signed by the great English artists in this _genre!_ Radiators in each room! Electric bulbs over the bed and in the ceiling! Iron beds! The inconvenient height of the windows from the floor lessened by a little wooden platform on which are a little chair and a little table and a little piece of needlework and a little vase of flowers!... Steadily they are occupying the palaces, each lady in her nook, and the slow force of their will moulds even the granite to the desired uses.

Why do they come? It cannot be out of passion for the great art of the world. Nobody who had a glimmering of the real sense of beauty could dress as they dress, move as they move, buy what they buy, or talk as they talk. They mingle in their heads Goltermann with Debussy, and Botticelli with Maude Goodman. Their drawing-room is full of Maude Goodman in her rich first period.. .. It cannot be out of a love of history, for they never unseal their lips in a spot where history has been made without demonstrating in the most painful manner an entire lack of historical imagination. They nibble daintily at crumbs of art and of archæology in special booklets which some of themselves have written and others of themselves have illustrated, and which make the coarse male turn with an almost animal satisfaction to Carl Baedeker or even the Reverend Herbert H.

Jeaffreson, M. A. It is impossible that these excellent creatures, whose only real defect has to do with the hooks and eyes down their spines, can ever comprehend the beauty and the significance of that by which they are surrounded. They have not the temperament. Temperamentally, they would be much more at home in Riga. Also it is impossible to believe that they are happy in Florence. They do not wear the look of joy. Their gestures are not those of happiness. Nevertheless they can only be in Florence because they have discovered that they are less unhappy here than at home. What deep malady of society is it that drives them out of their natural frame--the frame in which they are comely and even delectable, the frame which best sets off their finer qualities--into unnatural exile and the poor despised companionship of their own sex?

And what must be the force of that malady which drives them I The long levers that ultimately exert their power on the palaces of Florence are worked from England. Behind each of these solitary ladies, in the English background, there must be a mysterious male--relative, friend, lawyer, stockbroker--advising, controlling, forwarding cheques and cheques and cheques, always. These ladies, economically, are dolls of a financial system. Or you may call them the waste products of an arthritic civilisation. What a force is behind them, that they should possess themselves of another age and genius, and live in it as conquerors, modifying manners, architecture, and even perhaps language! The cloaked lady in front of the grille shall, if you choose, fairly be likened to a barbarian on the threshold of a philosopher’s dead court; hut as regards mere force, one may say that in her the Strozzis are up against an equal.

II--THE SEVENTH OF MAY, 1910

It was an exquisitely beautiful Italian morning, promising heat that a mild and constant breeze would temper. The East was one glitter. Harmless clouds were loitering across the pale sky, and across the Piazza children were taking the longest way to early school, as I passed from the clear sunshine into the soft transparent gloom of one of the great pantheons of Italy--a vast thirteenth-century Franciscan church, the largest church ever built by any mendicant Order--carved and decorated and painted by Donatello, Giotto, Andrea della Robbia, Rossellino, Maiano, Taddeo Gaddi, Verrocchio, the incomparable Mino da Fiesole, Vasari, Canova.

Already the whole place had been cleansed and swept, but at one of the remotest altars a charwoman was dusting. Little by little I descried other visitors in the distance, moving quietly under the intimidation of that calm, afraid to be the first to break the morning stillness. There was the red gleam of a Baedeker. At a nearer altar a widow in black was kneeling in one of those attitudes of impassioned surrender and appeal that strike you so curiously, when for instance, you go out of Harrods’ Stores suddenly into the Brompton Oratory. From an unseen chapel came the sound of chanting, perfunctory, a part of the silence; and last of all, at still another altar, I made out a richly coloured priest genuflecting, all alone, save for a black acolyte. In a corner two guides were talking business, and by the doors the beggars were talking business in ordinary tones before the official whining of the day should commence. The immense interior had spaciousness for innumerable separate and diverse activities, each undisturbed by the others. And all around me were the tombs and cenotaphs of great or notorious men, who had made the glory and the destiny of Italy; Dante, Galileo, Michael Angelo, Donatello, Machiavelli; and Alfieri, Rossini, Aretino, Cherubini, Alberti; and even St. Louis, and a famous fourteenth century English Bishop, and a couple of Bonapartes; many ages, races, climes.

*****

I sat down and opened the damp newspaper which I had just bought outside at the foot of the steps leading up to the dazzling marble façade. And when I had been staring at the newspaper some time I became aware that the widow at the altar in the middle distance had risen and was leaving the church, and then I saw to my surprise that she was an Irish lady staying in my hotel. She passed near me. Should I stop her, or should I not? I wanted to stop her, from the naïve pride which one feels in being able to communicate a startling piece of news of the first magnitude. But on the other hand, I really was nervous about telling her. To tell her seemed brutal, seemed like knocking her down. This was my feeling. She decided the question for me by deviating from her path to greet me.

“What a lovely morning!” she said.

“Have you heard about the King?” I asked her gruffly, well knowing that she had not.

“No,” she answered smiling. And then, as she looked at me, her smile faded.

“Well,” I said, “he’s dead!”

“What! _Our_ King?”

“Yes. He died at midnight. Here it is.” And I showed her the “_Recentissime_” or Latest News page of the newspaper, two lines in leaded type: “_Londra, 7, ore 2:30 (Urgenza). Re Edoardo è morto a mezzanotte_.” She knew enough Italian to comprehend that.

“This last midnight?” She was breathless.

“Yes.”

“But--but--no one even knew anything about him being ill?” she protested.

“Yesterday evening’s Italian papers had columns about the illness--it was bronchitis,” I said grimly.

“Oh!” she said, “I never see the Italian papers.”

Yet the name of Edward the Seventh had been on every newspaper placard in the land on Friday night. But in Italy these British have literally no sight for anything later than the sixteenth century.

Tears stood in her eyes. On my part it would have been just as kindly to knock her down.

“Just think of that little fellow at Osborne--he’s got to be Prince of Wales now, and I suppose they’ll take him away from there,” she murmured brokenly, as she went off, aghast.

*****

I sat down again. It seemed to me, as I reflected among these tombs and cenotaphs, that a woman’s eyes, on such an occasion, were a good test of the genuineness of popular affection.

I then noticed that, while the Irish lady and I had been whispering, another acquaintance of mine had mysteriously entered the church without my cognizance and had set up his tent in the south transept. This was a young man who, having gained a prominent place in a certain competition at the Royal College of Art, had been sent off with money in his pocket, at the expense of the British nation, to study art and to paint in Italy. He possessed what is called a travelling scholarship, and the treasures of Italy were at his feet as at the feet of a conqueror. Already he had visited me at my hotel, and filled my room with the odour of his fresh oil-sketches. There were only two things in his head--the art of painting, and the prospect of an immediate visit to Venice. He had lodged his easel on a memorial-stone among the flags of the pavement, and was painting a vista of tombs ending in a bright light of stained glass. His habit was to paint before the museums opened and after they closed. I went and accosted him. Again I was conscious of the naïve pride of a bringer of tragic tidings. He was young and strong, with fire in his eye. I need not be afraid of knocking him down, at any rate.

“The King’s dead,” I said.

He lifted his brush.

“Not--?”

I nodded.

He burst out with a tremendous, “By Jove!” that broke that fresh morning stillness once for all, and faintly echoed into silence among those tombs. “By Jove!”

His imagination had at once risen to the solemn grandeur of the event, as an event; but the sharp significance of death did not penetrate the armour of that enthusiastic youthfulness. “What a pity!” he exclaimed nicely; but he could not get the iridescent vision of Venice out of his head, nor the problems of his canvas. He continued painting--what else could he do?--and then, after a few moments, he said eagerly, “I wish I was in London!”

“Me too!” I said.

Probably most of the thousands of Englishmen in Italy had the same wish.

*****

I departed from the church. The chanting had ceased; the guides were still talking business, but the beggars had begun to whine.

In the dining-room of the hotel there was absolute silence. A lady near the door, with an Italian newspaper over her coffee-cup, who had never spoken to me before, and would probably never speak to me again, said:

“I suppose you’ve heard about--”

“Yes,” I said.

Everybody in the room knew. Everybody was

English. And nobody spoke. As the guests came down by ones and twos to breakfast, the lady near the door stopped each of them: “I suppose you’ve heard--” But none of them had. I was her sole failure. At length a retired military officer came down, already informed. “Where does this news come from?” he demanded of the room, impatiently, cautiously, half-incredulously, as one who would hesitate to trust any information that he had not seen in a London daily. With a single inflection of his commanding voice he wiped out the whole Press of Italy--that country of excellent newspapers. He got little answer. We all sat silent.

III--MORE ITALIAN OPERA