Stray studies from England and Italy

Preface

I have to thank the editors of Maemillanh Magazine and the Saturday Review for allowing me to reprint most of the papers in this series. In many cases, however, I have greatly changed their original form. A few pages will be found to repeat what I have already said in my " Short History."

Contents

PAGE

Sketches in Sunshine:

I.Cannes and St. Honorat 33

II. Carnival On The Cornice

Carnival in an ordinary little Italian town seems, no doubt, commonplace enough to those who have seen its glories in Rome — the crowded Corso, the rush of the maddened horses, the fire -fly twinklings of the Maccoletti. A single evening of simple fun, a few peasants laughing in the sunshine, a few children scrambling for bonbons, form an almost ridiculous contrast to the gorgeous outburst of revelry and color that ushers in Lent at the capital. But there are some people, after all, who still find a charm in the simple and the commonplace, and to whom the every -day life of Italy is infinitely pleasanter than the stately ceremonial of Rome. At any rate, the stranger who has fled from Northern winters to the shelter of the Riviera is ready to greet in the homeliest Carnival the incoming of spring. His first months of exile have probably been months of a little disappointment. lie is far from having found the perpetual sunshine which poets and guide-books led him to hope for. He has shivered at Christmas just as he shivered at home, he has had his days of snow-fall and his weeks of rain. If he is thoroughly British, he has growled, and grumbled, and written to expose "the humbug of the sunny South" in the Times ; if he is patient, he has jotted down day after day in his diary, and found a cold sort of statistical comfort in the discovery that the sunny days, after all, outnumbered the gloomy ones. The worst winter of the Riviera, he is willing to admit, would be a very mild winter at home ; but still, after each concession to one's diary and common sense, there remains a latent feeling of disappointment and deception.

But Carnival sweeps all this feeling away with the coming of the spring. From the opening of February, week follows week in a monotony of warm sunshine. Day after day there is the same cloudless cope of blue overhead, the same marvelous color in the sea, the same blaze of roses in the gardens, the same scent of violets in every lazy breath of air that wanders down from the hills. Every almond -tree is a mass of white bloom. The narcissus has found a rival along the terraces in the anemone, and already the wild tulip is preparing to dispute the palm of supremacy with both. It is the time for picnics, for excursions, for donkey - rides, for dreams beneath the clump of cypresses that shoot up black into the sky, for siestas beneath the olives. It is wonderful what a prodigious rush of peace and good temper follows on the first rush of spring. The very doctors of the winter resort shake hands with one another, the sermons of the chaplain lose their frost-bitten savor and die down into something like charity, scandal and tittle-tattle go to sleep in the sunshine. The stolid, impassive English nature blooms into a life strangely unlike its own. Papas forget their Times. Mammas forget their propriety. The stout British merchant finds himself astride of a donkey, and exchanging good-humored badinage with the laborers in the olive- terraces. The Dorcas of Exeter Hall leaves her tracts at home, and passes without a groan the pictured Madonna on every wall. Carnival comes, and completes the wreck of the proprieties. The girls secure their window, and pelt their black-bearded professor in the street below without dread of a scolding on the "convenances." The impassive spinster, whose voice never rises at home above the most polite whisper, screams with delight at the first sugar-plum that hits her, and furtively supplies her nieces with ammunition to carry on the » war. " It is such fun, isn't it, papa V shout the boys, as they lean breathless over the balcony, laughing and pelting at the crowd that laughs and pelts back again. And papa, who "puts down" fairs in England, and wonders what amusement people can find in peep-shows and merry-go-rounds, finds himself surprised into a "Very jolly, indeed !"

It is the same welcome to the spring that gives its charm to the Carnival in the minds of the Italians themselves. To the priest, of course, Carnival is simply a farewell to worldly junketings and a welcome to

Lent ; but, like every other Church festival, it is flinging off its ecclesiastical disguise, and donning among the people themselves its old mask as a sheer bit of nature - worship. The women still observe Lent, and their power as housekeepers forces its observance, to a certain extent, on their husbands and sons. The Italian shrugs his shoulders and submits in a humorous way to what is simply a bit of domestic discipline, revenges himself by a jest on the priesthood, and waits with his quiet "pazienza " till the progress of education shall have secured him a wife who won't grudge him his dinner. But Lent is no reality to him, and spring is a very real thing indeed. The winter is so short that the whole habit of his life and the very fabric of his home are framed on the apparent supposition that there is no such thing as winter at all. His notion of life is life in the open air, life in the sunshine. The peasant of the Cornice looks on with amazement at an Englishman tramping along in the rain. A little rain-fall or a little snow keeps every laborer at home with a murmur of " Cattivo Dio " between his teeth. A Scotchman or a Yorkshireman wraps his plaid around him, and looks with contempt on an idle race who are " afraid of a sprinkle." But the peasant of North Italy is no more of an idler than the peasant of the Lowlands. The truth is, that both he and his home are absolutely unprepared for bad weather. His clothes are thin and scanty. His diet is low. The wonder is how he gets through a hard day's work on food which an English pauper would starve upon. He Las no fire-place at home, and, if he had, he has no fuel. Wood is very dear, and coal there is none. If he gets wet through, there is no hearth to dry himself or his clothes at. Cold means fever, and fever with low diet means death. Besides, there is little loss in staying at home on rainy days. In England or the Lowlands, the peasant farmer who couldn't "bide a shower" would lose half the year; but a rainy day along the Cornice is so rare a thing that it makes little difference in the year's account.

It is much the same with the townsman, the trader, the professional man. When work in the shop or office is over, his life circles round the cafe. Society and home mean for him the chatty, gesticulating group of friends camped out round their little tables on the pavement under the huge awning that gives them shade. When winter breaks up the pleasant circle, and the dark, chilly evenings drive him, as we say, " home," he has no home to flee unto. He is not used to domes tic life, or to conversation with his wife or his children. Above all, there is no fire, no " hearth and home." Going home, in fact, means going to bed. An Italian doctor or an Italian lawyer knows nothing of the cozy evenings of the North, of the bright fire, the brighter chat round it, or the quiet book till sleep comes. Somebody has said truly enough that if a man wanted to see human life at its best, he would spend his winters in England and his summers in Italy. We have so much winter that we have faced it, made a study of it, and beaten it. Our houses are a great nuisance in warm weather, but their thick walls and close-fitting windows and broad fire-places are admirably adapted for cold. Italians, on the other hand, have so little winter that when the cold does come, it is completely their master. The large, dark, cool rooms that are so grateful in July are simply ice-houses in December. The large windows are full of crevices and draughts. An ordinary Italian positively dreads a fire, from his knowledge of the perils it entails in rooms so draughty as Italian rooms commonly are. He infinitely prefers to rub his blue little hands and wait till this inscrutable mystery of bad weather be overpast. But it is only the thought of what he suffers during the winter, short as it is in comparison with our own, that enables us to understand the ecstasy of his joy at the re -appearance of the spring. Every body meets every body with greetings on the warmth and the sunshine. The mother comes down again to bask herself at every door-step, and the little street is once more alive with chat and laughter. The very beggars exchange their whine for a more cheerful tone of insidious persuasion. The women sing, as they jog down the hill -paths with the big baskets of olives on their heads. The old dispossessed friar slumbers happily by the road -side. The little tables come out on to the pavement, and the society of the place forms itself afresh into buzzing groups of energetic conversers. The dormouse - life of winter is over, and the spring and the Carnival have come.

Carnival in a little Italian town, as we have said, is no very grand thing ; and, as a mere question of fun, it is no donbt amusing only to people who are ready to be amused. And yet there is a quaint fascination in it, as a whole ; in the rows of old women with demure little children in their laps ranged on the stone seats along the bridge ; the girls on the pavement ; the grotesque figures dancing along the road; the harlequins; the mimic Capuchins ; the dominoes with big noses ; the carriages rolling along amidst a fire of sugar-plums; the boys darting in and out, and smothering one with their handfuls of flour; the sham cook, wTith his pots and pans wreathed with vine-branches ; the sham cavalier, in theatrical cloak and trunk hose, who dashes about on a pony ; the solemn group tossing a doll to a church -like chant in a blanket; the chaff and violet bunches flung from the windows ; the fun, and life, and buzz, and color of it all. It is something very different, one feels, from the common country fair of home. In the first place, it is eminently picturesque. As one looks down from the balcony through a storm of sugar-plums, the eye revels in a perfect feast of color. Even the russet-brown of every old woman's dress glows in the sunshine into a strange beauty. Every little touch of red or blue in the girls' head-dresses shines out in the intense light. As the oddly attired maskers dart in and out or whirl past in the dance, the little street seems like a gay ribbon of shifting hues winding between its gray old houses with touches of fresh tints at every window and balcony. The crimson caps of the peasants stand out in bold relief against the dark green of the lemon -garden behind them. Overhead the wind is just stirring in the big pendent leaves of the two palm-trees in the centre of the street; and the eye, once caught by them, ranges on to the white mass of the town as it stands glowing on its hill-side, and thence to the brown hill-tops, and the intense blue of the sky.

The whole setting of the scene is un-English, and the scene itself is as un-English as its setting. The fun, the enjoyment, is universal. There is nothing of the complicated apparatus which an English fair requires, none of the contrivances to make people laugh — the clowns, the cheap-jacks, the movable theatres, the vans with fat women and two-headed calves, the learned pigs, the peep-shows, the peripatetic photographers, the weighing-machines, the swings, the merry-go-rounds. And so there are none of the groups of vacant faces, the joyless chaw-bacons lounging gloomily from stall to stall, the settled inanity and dreariness of the crowd that drifts through an English fair. An English peasant goes to be amused, and the clown finds it wonderfully hard work to amuse him. The peasant of Italy goes to Carnival to amuse himself, and to amuse every body else. He is full of joyousness and fun, and he wishes every body to be as funny and as joyous as himself. He has no notion of doing his merriment by deputy. He claps his mask on his face, or takes his bag of flour in his hand, and is himself the fun of the fair. His neighbor does precisely the same. The two farmers who were yesterday chaffering over the price of maize meet each, other in Carnival as Punch and Harlequin. Every boy has his false nose or his squeaking whistle. The quiet little maiden whom you saw yesterday washing her clothes in the torrent comes tripping up the street with a mask on her face. The very mothers, with their little ones in their laps, throw in their contribution of smart speeches and merry taunts to the fun of the affair. It is wonderful how simple the elements of their amusement are, and how perfectly they are amused. A little masquerading, a little dancing, a little pelting with flour and sugar-plums, and every body is as happy as possible.

And it is a happiness that is free from any coarse intermixture. The badinage is childish enough, but it has none of the foul slang in which an English crowd delights to express its notions of humor. The girls bandy " chaff " with their disguised lovers, but the " chaff " is what their mothers might hear. There is none of the brutal horse-play of home. Harlequin goes by with his little bladder suspended from a string, but the dexterous little touch is a touch and no more. The tiny sugar-plums rain like hail on one's face, but there is the fan of catching them and seeing the children hunt after them in the dust. The flour -pelting is the hardest to bear, but the annoyance is redeemed by the burst of laughter from the culprit and the by-standers. It is a rare thing to see any body lose his temper. It is a yet rarer thing to see any body drunk. The sulky altercations, the tipsy squabbles, of Northern amusements are unknown. The characteristic " prudence " of the Italian is never better displayed than in his merriment. He knows how far to carry his badinage. He knows when to have done with his fun. The tedious length of an English merry-making would be unintelligible to him ; he doesn't care to spoil the day's enjoyment by making a night of it. A few hours of laughter satisfy him, and when evening falls and the sunshine goes, he goes with the sunshine.

It is in the Carnival that one sees most conspicuously displayed that habit of social equality which is one of the special features of Italian life. Nothing is more unlike the social jealousy of the Frenchman, or the surly incivility with which a Lancashire operative thinks proper to show the world that he is as good a man as his master. In either case one feels the taint of a mere spirit of envious leveling, and a latent confession that the leveling process has still, in reality, to be accomplished. But the ordinary Italian has nothing of the leveler about him. The little town is proud of its marchese, and of the great palazzo that has entertained a king. It is a matter of public concern when the count gambles away his patrimony. An Italian noble is no object of jealousy to his fellow-citizens ; but, then, no one gives himself less of the airs of a privileged or exclusive cast. Cavour was a popular man because, noble as he was, he would smoke a cigar or stop for a chat with any body. The Carnival brings out this characteristic of Italian manners amusingly enough. The mask, the disguise, levels all distinctions. The count's whiskers are white with the flour just flung at him by the town-crier. The young nephews of the baron are the two harlequins who are exchanging badinage with the group of country girls at the corner. A general pelting of sugar-plums salutes the appearance of the marchese's four-inhand, with the marchese himself in an odd mufti on the box.

Social equality is possible, because among rich and poor alike there is the same social ease. Barber or donkey-driver chats to you with a perfect frankness, and unconsciousness of any need of reserve. In both rich and poor, too, there are the same social taste and refinement. The coarse dress of the peasant girl is worn with as native a dignity as the robe of a queen. An unconscious elegance breathes through the very disguises of the Carnival, grotesque as many of them are. The young fellow who has wreathed himself with flowers and vineleaves shows a knowledge of color and effect which an artist might envy him. But there is not one among the roughest of the peasants or of the towns-folk who has not that indescribable thing we call manner, or who would betray our insular awkwardness when we speak to a lord. And, besides this social equality, there is a family equality too. In England old people enjoy fun, but it is held to be indecorous in them to afford amusement to .others. A Palmerston may be a jester at eighty, but the jest must never go beyond words. But in an Italian Carnival the old claim just as much a part in the fun as the young. Grandfathers and grandmothers think it the most natural thing in the world to turn out in odd costumes, to give a good laugh to the grandchildren. Papa pops on the most comical mask he can find, and walks down the street arm-in-arm with his boy. In no country, perhaps, is the filial regard stronger than in Italy ; nowhere do mothers claim authority so long over their sons. But this seems to be compatible with a domestic liberty and ease which would be impossible in the graver nations of the North. If once we laughed at our mother's absurdities, a mother's influence would be gone. But an Italian will laugh and go on reverencing and obeying in a wTay we should never dream of. Altogether, it is wonderful how many sides of social life and national character find their illustration in a country Carnival.

III. Two Pirate Towns Of The Riviera

The view of Monaco, as one looks down on it from the mountain road which leads to Turbia, is, unquestionably, the most picturesque among all the views of the Riviera. The whole coast-line lies before us for a last look as far as the hills above San Eemo ; headland after headland running out into blue water ; white little towns nestling in the depth of sunny bays, or clinging to the brown hill-side ; villas peeping white from the dark olive masses ; sails gleaming white against the purple sea. The brilliancy of light, the purity and intensity of color, the clear freshness of the mountain air, tempered as it is by the warm sun-glow, make the long rise from Mentone hard to forget. Mentone itself steals out again and again from under its huge red cliffs, to look up at us. We pass by Eoccabrnna, half rock, half village, hanging high on the hill -side; we leave the orange -groves beneath us studded with golden fruit. Even the silvery, wayward olives fail us, even the pines grow thin and stunted. At last the mountain rises bare above us, with only a red rock jutting here and there from its ashen-colored front. We reach the top, and right in our road rises a vast fragment of Roman masonry, the tower of Turbia, while, thousands of feet beneath, Monaco glows "like a gem" in its setting of dark-blue sea. We are on the track of "The Daisy," and the verse of Tennyson's gay little poem comes back to us :

"What Roman strength Turbia show'd In ruin, by the mountain road ;

How like a gem, beneath, the city Of little Monaco, basking, glow'd."

Monaco stands on a promontory of rock which falls in bold cliffs into the sea. As one climbs to it from the bay, one sees the citadel with its huge bastions frowning on the white buildings of the palace, the long line of gray, ivy-crested walls topping the cliffs ; and above them the mass of the little town, broken by a single campanile and a few cypresses. Its situation at once marks the character of the place. It is the one town of the Riviera which, instead of lying screened in the hollow of some bay, as though eager to escape from pirate or Saracen, juts boldly out into the sea, as if on the lookout for prey. Its grim walls, the guns still mounted, and shot piled on its battlements, mark the pirate town of the past. At its feet, in trim square of hotel and gambling-house, with a smart Parisian look about it, as if the whole had been just caught up out of the boulevards and dropped on this Italian coast, lies the new Monaco, the pirate town of the present.

Even the least among Italian cities yields so much of interest in its past that we turn with disappointment from the history of Monaco. The place has always been a mere pirate haunt, without a break of liberty or civic life ; and yet there is a certain fascination in the perfect uniformity of its existence. The town from which Csesar sailed to Genoa and Rome vanished before the ravages of the Saracens, and the spot remained desert till it passed, by imperial cession, to Genoa, and the Genoese Commune erected a fort which became a refuge alternately for its Guelf or Ghibelline exiles, its Spinolas or its* Grimaldis. A church of fine twelfth-century work is the only monument which remains of this earlier time. At the opening of the fourteenth century Monaco passed finally to the Grimaldis, and became in their hands a haunt of buccaneers. Only one of their line rises into historic fame, and he is singularly connected with a great event in English history. Charles Grimaldi was one of the foremost leaders in the Italian wars of his day. He passed as a mercenary into the service of France, in her combat with Edward III., and his seventy-two galleys set sail from Monaco with the fifteen thousand Genoese bowmen who appear so unexpectedly in the forefront of the Battle of Crecy. The massacre of these forces drove him home again, to engage in attacks on the Catalans and Venetians, and struggles with Genoa, till the wealth which his piracy had accumulated enabled him to add Mentone and Roccabruna to his petty dominions. It is needless to trace the history of his house any farther; corsairs, soldiers of fortune, trimming adroitly in the struggles of the sixteenth century between France and Spain, sinking finally into mere vassals of Louis XIV. and hangers-on at the French court, the family history of the Grimaldis is one of treason and blood — brother murdering brother, nephew murdering uncle, assassination by subjects avenging the honor of daughters outraged by their master's lust.

Of the town itself, as we have said, there is no history at all; it consists, indeed, only of a few petty streets streaming down the hill from the palace square. The palace, though spoiled by a gaudy modern restoration, is externally a fine specimen of Italian Kenaissance work, its court painted all over with arabesques of a rough Caravaggio order, while the state -rooms within have a thoroughly French air, as if to embody the double character of their occupants, at once Lords of Monaco and Dues de Valentinois. The palace is encircled with a charming little garden, a bit of color and greenery squeezed in, as it were, between cliff and fortress, from which one looks down over precipices of red rock, with the prickly-pear clinging to their clefts and ledges, or across a rift of sea to the huge bare front of the Testa del Cane, with gigantic euphorbias, cactus, and orange-gardens fringing its base. A bribe administered to Talleyrand is said to have saved the political existence of Monaco at the Congress of Vienna ; but it is far more wonderful that, after all the annexations of late years, it should still remain an independent, though the smallest, principality in the world. But even the Grimaldis have not managed wholly to escape from the general luck of their fellow-rulers ; Mentone and Roccabruna were ceded to France some few years back for a sum of four million francs ; and the present Lord of Monaco is the ruler of but a few streets and some two thousand subjects. His army reminds one of the famous war establishment of the older German princelings. One year, indeed, to the amazement of beholders, it rose to the gigantic force of four - and - twenty men ; but then, as we were gravely told by an official, "it had been doubled in consequence of the war." Idler and absentee as he is, the prince is faithful to the traditions of his house ; the merchant, indeed, sails without dread beneath the once dreaded rocks of the pirate haunt ; but a new pirate town has risen on the shores of its bay. It is the pillage of a host of gamblers that maintains the heroic army of Monaco, that cleanses its streets, and fills the exchequer of its lord.

There is something exquisitely piquant in the contrast between the gloomy sternness of the older robberhold and the gayety and attractiveness of the new. Nothing can be prettier than the gardens, rich in fountains and statues and tropical plants, which surround the neat Parisian square of buildings. The hotel is splendidly decorated, and its cuisine claims to be the best in Europe. There is a pleasant cafe. The doors of the Casino itself stand hospitably open, and strangers may wander without a question from hall to reading-room, or listen in the concert -room to an excellent band which plays twice a day. The salon itself, the terrible " Hell " which one has pictured with all sorts of Dantesque accompaniments, is a pleasant room, gayly painted, with cozies all round it, and a huge mass of gorgeous flowers in the centre. Nothing can be more unlike one's preconceived ideas than the gambling itself, or the aspect of the gamblers around the tables. Of the wild excitement, the frenzy of gain, the outbursts of despair which one has come prepared to witness, there is not a sign. The games strike the by-stander as singularly dull and uninteresting. One wearies of the perpetual deal and turnup of the cards at rouge-et-noir, of the rattle of the ball as it dances into its pigeon-hole at roulette, of the monotonous chant of " Make your game, gentlemen," or, "The game is made." The croupiers rake in their gains or poke out the winnings with the passive regularity of machines ; the gamblers sit round the table with the vacant solemnity of undertakers. The general air of the company is that of a number of well-to-do people bored out of their lives, and varying their boredom with quiet nods to the croupier and assiduous prickings of little cards.

The boredom is apparently greatest at rouge-et-noir, where the circle is more aristocratic, and thousands can be lost and won in a night. Every body looks tired, absent, inattentive; nobody takes much notice of his neighbor or of the spectators looking on ; nobody cares to speak ; a finger suffices to direct the croupier to push the stake on to the desired spot, a nod or a look to indicate the winner. The game goes on in a dull uniformity ; nobody varies his stake ; a few napoleons are added to or subtracted from the heaps before each as the minutes go on ; sometimes a little sum is done on a paper beside the player; but there is the same impassive countenance, the same bored expression everywhere. Now and then one player gets quietly up and another sits quietly 'down. But there is nothing startling or dramatic, no frenzies of hope or exclamations of despair, nothing of the gambler of fiction with "his hands clasped to his burning forehead," and the like. To any one who is not fascinated by the mere look of rolls of napoleons pushed from one color to another, or of gold raked about in little heaps, there is something very difficult to understand in the spell which a gaming-table exercises. Roulette is a little more amusing, as it is more intelligible to the looker-on. The stakes are smaller, the company changes oftener, and is socially more varied. There is not such a dead, heavy earnestness about these riskers of five-franc pieces as about the more desperate gamblers of ronge-et-noir ; the outside fringe of lookers-on bend over with their stakes to back " a run of luck," and there is a certain quiet buzz of interest when the game seems going against the bank. There is always some one going and coming, overdressed girls lean over and drop their stake and disappear, young clerks bring their quarter's salary, the casual visitor "doesn't mind risking a few francs" at roulette.