From sketch-book and diary Part 7

In certain things modern Italy affords us an easier life. We are given to nagging at the Italians for their dreadful want of taste in spoiling the beauty of their cities, but in the old days we were nagging at them for their dirt. Now Rome is the cleanest capital in the world. Some one said it is more than clean, it is dusted. And is not the Society for the Protection of Animals in _existence_, at least? With what derision such an inst.i.tution would have been heard of in our childhood's days--a suggestion of those "mad English."

Do you call to mind what scenes used to occur whenever mamma came out with us, between her and the muleteers? I can see her now, in the fulness of her English beauty, flying out one day at a carter for flogging and kicking his mules that were hardly able to drag a load up the Albaro Hill. This was the dialogue. Mamma--"_Voi siete un cattivo!_"

Muleteer--"_E voi siete bella!_" Mamma--"_Voi siete un birbante!_"

Muleteer--"_E voi siete bella!_" Mamma--"_Voi siete uno scelerato!_"

Muleteer--"_E voi siete bella!_" And so on, till we had reached the bottom of the cruel hill, mamma at the end of her _crescendo_ of fulminations and the man's voice, still calling "_E voi siete bella_"

in imitation of her un-Genoese phraseology, lost in distance at the top.

"I shall get a fit some day," were her first English words. Poor dear mother, the shooting of the singing-birds in spring, the dirt, the noise, the flies, the mosquitoes--so many thorns in her Italian rose!

Yet how she loved that rose, but not more than the sweet violet of our England that had no such thorns. The music in the churches, too, was trying in those days, and to none more so than to that music-loving soul. We have seen her doing her best to fix her mind on her devotions, with her fingers in her ears, and her face puckered up into an excruciated bunch. I hope Pius X. has enforced the plain-chant everywhere, and stopped those raspings of secular waltzes on sour fiddles that were supposed to aid our fervour. But I am nagging. As a Northerner, I have no right to lecture the Italians as to what sort of music is best for devotion, nor to tell them that the dressing of their sacred images in gaudy finery on festival days is not the way to deepen reverence. The Italians do what suits them best in these matters, and if our English taste is offended let us stay at home.

Well, well, here below there is nothing bright without its shadow. When we had the delicious national costumes we had the dirt and the cruelty.

But why, I ask, cannot we keep the national dress, the local customs, the picturesqueness while we gain the cleanly and the kind? Every time I revisit Italy I miss another bit of colour and pleasing form amongst the populations. In Rome not a cloak is to be seen on the citizens, that black cloak lined with red or green they used to throw over the left shoulder, toga-wise--only old left-off ulsters or overcoats from Paris or Berlin. Not a red cap on the men of Genoa; the _pezzotto_ and _mezzero_, most feminine headgear for the women, are extinct there.

Ladies in Rome are even shy of wearing the black mantilla to go to the Vatican, and put it on in the cloak-room of the palace, removing it again to put on the barbarous Parisian hat for the streets. When we foreign ladies drive in our mantillas to the Audiences we are stared at!

Even my old friends the red, blue, and green umbrellas of portly dimensions, formerly dear to the clergy, no longer light up the sombre clerical garb. Did I not see a flight of bare-footed Capuchins, last time in Rome, put up, every monk of them, a black Gingham when a shower came on, and I was expecting an efflorescence of my fondly-remembered Gamps? Next time I go the other bit of clerical colour will have vanished, and I shall find them using white pocket-handkerchiefs instead of the effective red bandana.

Well, but, you are told, the beggars are cleared out, those persistent unfortunates who used to thrust their deformities and diseases before you wherever you turned, with the wailing refrain, "_Misericordia, signore!_" "_Un povero zoppo!_" "_Un cieco!_" "_Ho fame!_" etc. etc. But they sunned themselves and ate their bread and onions where they liked (not where _we_ liked) in perfect liberty. Where are they now? In dreary poorhouses, I suppose, out of sight, regularly fed and truly miserable.

I am afraid that much of our modern comfort is owing simply to the covering up of unpleasantnesses. In the East, especially, life is seen with the cover taken off, and many painful sights and many startling bits of the reality of life spoil the suns.h.i.+ne for us there for a while.

But worse things are in the London streets, only "respectably" covered up, and I am sure that more cruelty is committed by the ever-increasing secret work of the vivisector than ever wrung the heart of the compa.s.sionate in the old days in the open street.

And there, as we sit on the hillside above Signa, lies Florence, just discernible in the far-off plain, where I learnt so much of my art.

Those frescoes of Masaccio, Andrea del Sarto, and all those masters of the human face who revelled in painting every variety of human type, how they augmented my taste that way! Nothing annoyed me so much as the palpable use of one model in a crowded composition. Take a dinner-party at table--will you ever see two noses alike as you run your eye along the guests? Even in a regiment of evenly matched troops, all of one nationality, I ask you to show me two men in the ranks sharing the same nose!

Ah! those days I spent in the cloisters of the SS. Annuziata, making pencil copies of Andrea's figures in the series of frescoes ill.u.s.trating the life of St Philip. It was summer-time, and the tourists only came bothering me towards the end. That hot summer, when I used to march into Florence, accompanied by little Majolina, in the still-early mornings, when the sicala was not yet in full chirp for the day! Four days a week to my master's studio under the shadow of the Medici Chapel, and two to my dear cloisters; the Sunday at our villa under Fiesole. Happy girl!

I see in my diary this brilliant adaptation of Coleridge's lines--

"'Tis sweet to him who all the week Through city crowds must push his way, etc."

'Tis sweet to her who all the week With brush and paint must work her way To stroll thro' florence vineyards cool And hallow thus the Sabbath Day.

I have much to thank my master Guiseppe Bellucci for, who drilled me so severely, carrying on the instruction I had the advantage to receive from thorough-going Richard Burchett the head-master at South Kensington--never-to-be-forgotten South Kensington.

It seems a shame to be saying so much about Florence and not to pause a few minutes to give the other a little hand-shake in pa.s.sing. There I began my art-student life, than which no part of an artist's career can be more free from care or more buoyed up with aspirations for the future. Dear early days spent with those bright and generous comrades, my fellow-students, so full of enthusiasm over what they called my "promise"--I have all those days chronicled in the old diaries. There I recall the day I was promoted to the "Life Cla.s.s" from the "Antique"--a joyful epoch; and the Sketching Club where "old D----," the second master, used to give "Best" nearly every time to Kate Greenaway and "Second Best" to me. What joy when I got a "Best" one fine day. She and I raced neck and neck with those sketches after that. The "Life Cla.s.s"

was absorbingly interesting. But how nervous and excited I felt at grappling with my first living model. He was a fine old man (but with a bibulous eye) costumed to represent "Cranmer walking to the Tower." I see in the diary, "Cranmer walked rather unsteadily to the Tower to-day, and we all did badly in consequence." Then came one of Cromwell's Ironsides whose morion gave him a perpetual headache, followed by my first full-length, a costume model in tights and slashed doublet whom we spitefully called "Spindle-Shanks" and greatly disliked. What was my surprise, long years afterwards, to stumble upon my "Spindle-Shanks" as "'Christopher Columbus,' by the celebrated painter of etc. etc." I then remembered I had made a present of him, when finished, to our "char,"

much to her embarra.s.sment, I should think. However, she seems to have got rid of the "white elephant" with profit to herself in course of time. But I must not let myself loose on those glorious student days, so full of work and of play, otherwise I would wander too far away from my subject. It was tempting to linger over that hand-shake.

I don't think I ever felt such heat as in Florence. As the July sun was sending every one out of the baking city, shutting up the House of Deputies, and generally taking the pith out of things, I remember Bellucci coming into the studio one day with his hair in wisps, and hinting that it would be as well for me to give myself _un mesetto di riposo_. I did take that "little month of rest" at our villa, and sketched the people and the oxen, and mixed a great deal in peasant society, benefitting thereby in the loss of my Genoese tw.a.n.g under the influence of their most grammatical Tuscan. The peasant is the most honourable, religious, and philosophical of mankind. I feel always safe with peasants and like their conversation and ways. They lead the natural life. Before daylight, in midsummer, one heard them directing their oxen at the plough, and after the mid-day siesta they were back at their work till the Ave Maria. It was a large family that inhabited the peasant quarters of our villa and worked the landlord's vineyards. How they delighted in my sketches, in giving me sittings in the intervals of work, in seeing me doing amateur harvesting with a sickle and helping (?) them to bind the wheat sheaves and sift the grain. I must often have been in the way, now I think of it, but never a hint did these ladies and gentlemen of the h.o.r.n.y hand allow to escape to my confusion.

Carlotta, the eldest girl, read me some of the "Jerusalem Delivered" one full-moon night, to show me how easily one could read small print by the Italian moonlight. Her mother invited me to dine with the family one day as they were having a rare repast. Cencio had found two hedgehogs in a hollow olive-tree, and the _ragout_ that ensued must be tasted by the _signorina_. Through the door of the kitchen where we dined on that occasion the two white oxen were seen reposing in the next apartment after their morning's work. After tasting the _spinoso_ stew, I begged to be allowed to take a stool in the corner and sketch the whole family at table, and with the perfect grace of those people I was welcomed to do so, and I got them all in as they sucked their hedgehog bones in concert. You were reading Keats in one of the arbours, meanwhile, I remember.

I loved those days at Florence where I felt I was making the most of my time and getting on towards the day when I should paint my first "real"

picture. When next I visited Florence with you for those memorable vintages at Caravaggio in '75, '76, which I recalled just now to your remembrance, I had painted my first "real" picture and received in London more welcome than I deserved or hoped for.

Twice I have revisited the outside of my Florentine studio in recent years, not daring to go in. Bellucci is long dead and I don't know who is there now. Standing under that tall window I have reviewed my career since the days I worked there. I rejoice to know that my best works are nearly all in public galleries or in the keeping of my Sovereign. To the artist, the idea of his works changing hands is never a restful one.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER II

SIENNA, PERUGIA, AND VESUVIUS

A two days' excursion to Sienna at the close of our second vintage at Caravaggio was a fit _finale_ to the last visit you and I ever paid to Italy _en garcon_.

From Tuscany to Etruria--deeper still into the luxury of a.s.sociating with the past. Honey-coloured Sienna! It dwells in my memory bathed in suns.h.i.+ne; the little city like a golden cup overflowing with the riches it can scarcely hold; the home of St. Catherine and the scene of her ecstasies and superhuman endeavours: the battlefield of St. Bernardine's manful struggle against vice and luxury and gambling, so rampant and unabashed in his time. Everywhere in this city you see, sculptured on circular plaques of old white marble, let into the walls in street and square, that monogram which all denominations of Christians know so well, the I.H.S. with the Cross--_Jesus Hominum Salvator_. Whether the engraved characters seen on the tombs in the Roman Catacombs were or were not identical with those three initials and their significance, they were so regarded by all the Churches for centuries, and the monogram which St. Bernardine caused to be set up in this way throughout Sienna was moulded on them in that belief. It was he who caused this emblem to be so placed that the reluctant public eye could not wholly avoid it, and who had it illuminated on tablets which he held up to his congregations at the end of his rousing sermons, thus making that appeal to the mind through the eye which he relied upon as one of his most effectual levers. One may say he morally forced the people to recognise and venerate that Name once more.

Upon the carved coats-of-arms of Guelph and Ghibelline, which seemed to gird at each other from the walls, he imposed this sign of peace, and hence the multiplicity of these lovely symbols I am trying to recall. They are seals which his strong hand stamped upon his native place.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLOUGHING IN TUSCANY]

Like all the great saints, Bernardine was practical. The manufacturers of playing-cards and dice, finding their customers leaving them in ever-increasing numbers to follow the Franciscan with a fervour which reached to extraordinary heights, brought their complaints to him.

Bankruptcy was upon them. "Turn your talent to painting this Name on cards and sell them to the people." This was done, and these little tablets with the "I.H.S." became endowed with a peculiar sanct.i.ty to the purchasers and sold well, so that little fortunes flowed in to fill the void left by the fall in playing-cards. All these we spoke of on the spot, I remember, and I write these words to you who know it all better than I do, to show you I have not forgotten.

Sometimes the monogram is inserted in the marble discs in gold on a blue ground. Do you see again those circles of warm white marble, those s.h.i.+ning letters surrounded with golden rays on the blue centre, the reflected light in the hollows of the carving, the Italian sky above?

These Siennese blank walls are better employed than those of modern Rome, where we may see somebody's soap or blacking belauded in our mother tongue _ad nauseam_.

"A city set on a hill cannot be hid." How high Sienna is set! A lovelier bit of man's workmans.h.i.+p was never held aloft for man to see.

"To appreciate the outside aspect of Sienna we drove out" (I see in my diary) "to the fortress-villa of Belcaro, with an introduction to the owner, a recluse, who, though he has been to London once, somewhere in the 'forties, has never been to Sienna.

"The drive to this historic villa was through a perfect Pre-Raphaelite landscape, full of highly-cultivated hillocks, above which the grander distant country unfolded itself. I apologized to the old Masters for what I had said of their landscape backgrounds before I had seen the Siennese middle distances whose type seems to have inspired so many of them.

"Each turn in the road gave us a new aspect of the golden-brown city behind us, on its steep hill. Perhaps the most effective view of it is from near Belcaro, where you get the dark stone-pines in the immediate foreground.

"And the interior of the city! Those narrow streets they call here _rughe_ and _costarelle_ are fascinating, dipping down to some archway through which you see, far below, the sudden misty distance of the rolling campagna, or a peep of a piazza in dazzling sunlight contrasting with the semi-darkness of the narrow stone lane. So narrow are these lanes that a pair of oxen drawing a cart all but sc.r.a.pe the side walls with the points of their enormous horns, and you must manage to avoid a collision by obliterating yourself in the nearest doorway. We found the people beautiful. There are no modern abominations in the way of buildings here, so that one enjoys Sienna with unalloyed pleasure." ...

At last!

I suppose nothing could be more satisfying to the lover of beauty and of that dignity which belongs to the great works of architecture of the past than the aspect of Sienna Cathedral in the light of a September moon, the planets and stars watching with her over that sanctuary in the cloudless heavens.

The silence of a little Italian city like this at night, when the full moon dispenses with the artificial lighting, is always taking. To-night the urban silence is broken perhaps by a burst of singing and the thrumming of a guitar; young fellows with apparently plenty of leisure are coming jauntily along the pavement singing, "_Oi! Oi! Oi! Tirami la gamba se tu puoi_," and suddenly dive down a pitch-dark alley; then a burst of laughter from a cavernous wine-shop; then stillness again. A dog barks in a garden over whose walls you see where the "blessed moon tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops." A fountain bubbles and gushes softly as you come upon its hiding-place in the deep shadow from a bit of loopholed wall that you scarcely recognize as the one you were sketching this morning. Hither a few fire-flies, remnants of the summer host, have strayed from beyond the city ramparts. Footsteps echo in the silence more than in the day-time; not a wheel is heard, but the campagna below is heard. It is murmuring with its invisible life of insects all awake and full of shrill energy--goodness knows about what.

Your own energy is ebbing after the day's enchantment and you feel that to stroll and sit and look is all the bliss you need.

I had a revelation at Sienna about frescoes. In this extraordinarily dry atmosphere you can see, as nowhere else, the fresco as it was originally intended to appear. I do not know that I liked the effect as I came into the sacristy of the cathedral and saw Pinturicchio's apparently freshly painted scenes. These were so true, not only in their linear, but (strange to say) in their aerial, perspective that the effect was as if the walls had opened to show us these crowds of figures in gorgeous halls or airy landscapes _outside_ the building, and the eye was deceived by a positive illusion. One wants to _feel_ the walls of an apartment, and when its frescoes are flat and faded, and appearing more as lovely bits of decorative colour, as we see elsewhere, the eye is better satisfied. But, looked at as pictures, these richly coloured works are truly masterly, full of character and natural, realistic action.

Much of the beauty of the Middle Ages which we delight in is owing to the mellowing of Time. When first turned out by painter or mason this beauty would not so charm the artist. A brandnew feudal castle must have looked very hard and staring; a walled city like a Brobdingnagian toy town in a round box. No lichens on those walls; no ivy, no clumps of wallflowers, or any of those compa.s.sionate veils that Nature, if allowed a free hand, gently lays upon our crudities, and which the modern Italian _Sindaco_ calls "_indecenza_" and commands to be sc.r.a.ped away.

The mind recognises the rightness of the inevitable bare look of a new building, but a sc.r.a.ped ruin offends both mind and eye.

PERUGIA

ONE day in April '99 I was reading a fascinating little book by Miss Duff Gordon on Perugia as I sat on a fallen pine-tree trunk in our wood at Rosebank in remote Cape Colony. I read it with intenser longing than ever to be back in the world of art, of history, of culture, of well-known and well-loved things, and, thinking we were likely to be in our lovely exile for at least three years (with a short flight home to England in the interval, perhaps), I thought of several precious things I would give to be at Perugia in reality. That very day in that very month of the following year I was there!

Why do we fret about the future? Vain weakness! In my experience the future has brought more than I wished for and better things, and the sad things that have come have been those I had not feared.

It is a lovely journey from Florence to Perugia--all beautiful, and one wants to be at both ends of the railway carriage at once so as to miss nothing. The old brown cities along the route are as frequent as the Rhine castles; they still have their battlemented walls and gateways to delight the artist for a long while yet. Perugia did not frown upon us so mediaevally this time, as we drove up the long zigzag to it, as when you and I first saw it. I think some of the frown has been demolished since those days, and indeed I do not regret this. They are raising some good public buildings where, I am told, the old castle stood, and in these you see lovely pillars of rosy marble or granite quarried from a.s.sisi. That old castle had gloomy memories for the Italians and had no claim to stay.