Chapter XIV
There was a Diligence next day for Turin over Mount Cenis, which went only twice a week (stopping at night) and I was glad to secure (as I thought) two places in the interior at seventy francs a seat, for 240 miles. The fare from Paris to Lyons, a distance of 360 miles, was only fifty francs each, which is four times as cheap; but the difference was accounted for to me, from there being no other conveyance, which was an arbitrary reason, and from the number and expense of horses necessary to drag a heavy double coach over mountainous roads. Besides, it was a Royal Messagerie, and I was given to understand that Messrs. Bonnafoux paid the King of Sardinia a thousand crowns a year for permission to run a Diligence through his territories. The knave of a waiter (I found) had cheated me; and that from Chambery there was only one place in the interior and one in the coupé, which turned out to be a cabriolet, a place in front with a leathern apron and curtains, which in winter time, and in travelling over snowy mountains and through icy valleys, was not a situation ‘devoutly to be wished.’ I had no other resource, however, having paid my four pounds in advance at the over-pressing instances of the Garçon, but to call him a coquin, (which being a Milanese was not quite safe) to throw out broad hints (à l’Anglais) of a collusion between him and the Office, and to arrange as well as I could with the Conducteur, that I and my fellow-traveller should not be separated. I would advise all English people travelling abroad to take their own places at coach-offices, and not to trust to waiters, who will make a point of tricking them, both as a principle and pastime; and further to procure letters of recommendation (in case of disagreeable accidents on the road) for it was a knowledge of this kind, namely, that I had a letter of introduction to one of the Professors of the College at Lyons, that procured me even the trifling concession above-mentioned, through the influence which the landlady of the Hotel had with the Conducteur: otherwise, instead of being stuck in the cabriolet, I might have mounted on the imperial, and any signs of vexation or impatience I might have exhibited, would have been construed into ebullitions of the national character, and a want of bienseance in Monsieur l’Anglois. The French, and foreigners in general, (as far as I have seen) are civil, polite, easy-tempered, obliging; but the art of keeping up plausible appearances stands them in lieu of downright honesty. They think they have a right to cheat you if they can (a compliment, a civil bow, a shrug, is worth the money!) and the instant you find out the imposition or begin to complain, they turn away from you as a disagreeable or wrong-headed person, and you can get no redress but by main force. It is not the original transgressor, but he who declares he is aggrieved, that is considered as guilty of a breach of good manners, and a disturber of the social compact. I think one is more irritated at the frequent impositions that are practised on one abroad, because the novelty of the scene, one’s ignorance of the ways of the world, and the momentary excitement of the spirits and of the flush of hope, have a tendency to renew in one’s mind the unsuspecting simplicity and credulity of youth; and the petty tricks and shuffling behaviour we meet with on the road are a greater baulk to our warm, sanguine, buoyant, travelling impulses.
Annoyed at the unfair way in which we had been treated, and at the idea of being left to the mercy of the Conducteur, whose ‘honest, sonsie, bawsont face’ had, however, no more of the fox in it than implied an eye to his own interest, and might be turned to our own advantage, we took our seats numerically in the Royal Diligence of Italy, at seven in the evening (January 20) and for some time suffered the extreme penalties of a French stage-coach—not indeed ‘the icy fang and season’s difference,’ but a very purgatory of heat, closeness, confinement, and bad smells. Nothing can surpass it but the section of a slave-ship, or the Black-hole of Calcutta. Mr. Theodore Hook or Mr. Croker should take an airing in this way on the Continent, in order to give them a notion of, and I should think, a distaste for the blessings of the Middle Passage. Not only were the six places in the interior all taken, and all full, but they had suspended a wicker basket (like a hen-coop) from the top of the coach, stuffed with fur-caps, hats, overalls, and different parcels, so as to make it impossible to move one way or other, and to stop every remaining breath of air. A negociant at my right-hand corner, who was inclined to piece out a lengthened recital with a parce que and a de sorte que at every word, having got upon ticklish ground, without seeing his audience, was cut short in the flower of his oratory, by asserting that Barcelona and St. Sebastian’s in Spain were contiguous to each other. ‘They were at opposite sides of the country,’ exclaimed in the same breath a French soldier and a Spaniard, who sat on the other side of the coach, and whom he was regaling with the gallant adventures of a friend of his in the Peninsula, and not finding the usual excuse—‘C’est égal‘—applicable to a blunder in geography, was contented to fall into the rear of the discourse for the rest of the journey. At midnight we found that we had gone only nine miles in five hours, as we had been climbing a gradual ascent from the time we set out, which was our first essay in mountain-scenery, and gave us some idea of the scale of the country we were beginning to traverse. The heat became less insupportable as the noise and darkness subsided; and as the morning dawned, we were anxious to remove that veil of uncertainty and prejudice which the obscurity of night throws over a number of passengers whom accident has huddled together in a stage-coach. I think one seldom finds one’s-self set down in a party of this kind without a strong feeling of repugnance and distaste, and one seldom quits it at last without some degree of regret. It was the case in the present instance. At day-break, the pleasant farms, the thatched cottages, and sloping valleys of Savoy attracted our notice, and I was struck with the resemblance to England (to some parts of Devonshire and Somersetshire in particular) a discovery which I imparted to my fellow-travellers with a more lively enthusiasm than it was received. An Englishman thinks he has only to communicate his feelings to others to meet with sympathy, and is not a little disconcerted if (after this amazing act of condescension) he is at all repulsed. How should we laugh at a Frenchman who expected us to be delighted with his finding out a likeness of some part of England to France? We English are a nation of egotists, say what we will; and so much so, that we expect others to swallow the bait of our self-love.
At Pont Beau-Voisin, the frontier town of the King of Sardinia’s dominions, we stopped to breakfast, and to have our passports and luggage examined at the Barrier and Custom-house. I breakfasted with the Spaniard, who invited himself to our tea-party, and complimented Madame (in broken English) on the excellence of her performance. We agreed between ourselves that the Spaniards and English were very much superior to the French. I found he had a taste for the Fine Arts, and I spoke of Murillo and Velasquez as two excellent Spanish painters. ‘Here was sympathy.’ I also spoke of Don Quixote—‘Here was more sympathy.’ What a thing it is to have produced a work that makes friends of all the world that have read it, and that all the world have read! Mention but Don Quixote, and who is there that does not own him for a friend, countryman, and brother? There is no French work, at the name of which (as at a talisman) the scales of national prejudice so completely fall off; nay more, I must confess there is no English one. We were summoned from our tea and patriotic effusions to attend the Douane. It was striking to have to pass and repass the piquets of soldiers stationed as a guard on bridges across narrow mountain-streams that a child might leap over. After some slight dalliance with our great-coat pockets, and significant gestures as if we might or might not have things of value about us that we should not, we proceeded to the Custom-house. I had two trunks. One contained books. When it was unlocked, it was as if the lid of Pandora’s box flew open. There could not have been a more sudden start or expression of surprise, had it been filled with cartridge-paper or gun-powder. Books were the corrosive sublimate that eat out despotism and priestcraft—the artillery that battered down castle and dungeon-walls—the ferrets that ferreted out abuses—the lynx-eyed guardians that tore off disguises—the scales that weighed right and wrong—the thumping make-weight thrown into the balance that made force and fraud, the sword and the cowl, kick the beam—the dread of knaves, the scoff of fools—the balm and the consolation of the human mind—the salt of the earth—the future rulers of the world! A box full of them was a contempt of the constituted Authorities; and the names of mine were taken down with great care and secrecy—Lord Bacon’s ‘Advancement of Learning,’ Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost,’ De Stutt-Tracey’s ‘Ideologie,’ (which Bonaparte said ruined his Russian expedition,) Mignet’s ‘French Revolution,’ (which wants a chapter on the English Government,) ‘Sayings and Doings,’ with pencil notes in the margin, ‘Irving’s Orations,’ the same, an ‘Edinburgh Review,’ some ‘Morning Chronicles,’ ‘The Literary Examiner,’ a collection of Poetry, a Volume bound in crimson velvet, and the Paris edition of ‘Table-talk.’ Here was some questionable matter enough—but no notice was taken. My box was afterwards corded and leaded with equal gravity and politeness, and it was not till I arrived at Turin that I found it was a prisoner of state, and would be forwarded to me anywhere I chose to mention, out of his Sardinian Majesty’s dominions. I was startled to find myself within the smooth polished grasp of legitimate power, without suspecting it; and was glad to recover my trunk at Florence, with no other inconvenience than the expense of its carriage across the country.[36]
It was noon as we returned to the inn, and we first caught a full view of the Alps over a plashy meadow, some feathery trees, and the tops of the houses of the village in which we were. It was a magnificent sight, and in truth a new sensation. Their summits were bright with snow and with the midday sun; they did not seem to stand upon the earth, but to prop the sky; they were at a considerable distance from us, and yet appeared just over our heads. The surprise seemed to take away our breath, and to lift us from our feet. It was drinking the empyrean. As we could not long retain possession of our two places in the interior, I proposed to our guide to exchange them for the cabriolet; and, after some little chaffering and candid representations of the outside passengers of the cold we should have to encounter, we were installed there to our great satisfaction, and the no less contentment of those whom we succeeded. Indeed I had no idea that we should be steeped in these icy valleys at three o’clock in the morning, or I might have hesitated. The view was cheering, the clear air refreshing, and I thought we should set off each morning about seven or eight. But it is part of the sçavoir vivre in France, and one of the methods of adding to the agrémens of travelling, to set out three hours before day-break in the depth of winter, and stop two hours about noon, in order to arrive early in the evening. With all the disadvantages of preposterous hours and of intense cold pouring into the cabriolet like water the two first mornings, I cannot say I repented of my bargain. We had come a thousand miles to see the Alps for one thing, and we did see them in perfection, which we could not have done inside. The ascent for some way was striking and full of novelty; but on turning a corner of the road we entered upon a narrow defile or rocky ledge, overlooking a steep valley under our feet, with a headlong turbid stream dashing down it, and spreading itself out into a more tranquil river below, a dark wood of innumerable pine-trees covering the side of the valley opposite, with broken crags, morasses, and green plots of cultivated ground, orchards, and quiet homesteads, on which the sun glanced its farewell rays through the openings of the mountains. On our left, a precipice of dark brown rocks of various shapes rose abruptly at our side, or hung threatening over the road, into which some of their huge fragments, loosened by the winter’s flaw, had fallen, and which men and mules were employed in removing—(the thundering crash had hardly yet subsided, as you looked up and saw the fleecy clouds sailing among the shattered cliffs, while another giant-mass seemed ready to quit its station in the sky)—and as the road wound along to the other extremity of this noble pass, between the beetling rocks and dark sloping pine-forests, frowning defiance at each other, you caught the azure sky, the snowy ridges of the mountains, and the peaked tops of the Grand Chartreuse, waving to the right in solitary state and air-clad brightness.—It was a scene dazzling, enchanting, and that stamped the long-cherished dreams of the imagination upon the senses. Between those four crystal peaks stood the ancient monastery of that name, hid from the sight, revealed to thought, half-way between earth and heaven, enshrined in its cerulean atmosphere, lifting the soul to its native home, and purifying it from mortal grossness. I cannot wonder at the pilgrimages that are made to it, its calm repose, its vows monastic. Life must there seem a noiseless dream;—Death a near translation to the skies! Winter was even an advantage to this scene. The black forests, the dark sides of the rocks gave additional and inconceivable brightness to the glittering summits of the lofty mountains, and received a deeper tone and a more solemn gloom from them; while in the open spaces the unvaried sheets of snow fatigue the eye, which requires the contrast of the green tints or luxuriant foliage of summer or of spring. This was more particularly perceptible as the day closed, when the golden sunset streamed in vain over frozen valleys that imbibed no richness from it, and repelled its smile from their polished marble surface. But in the more gloomy and desert regions, the difference is less remarkable between summer and winter, except in the beginning of spring, when the summits of the hoary rocks are covered with snow, and the cleft[s] in their sides are filled with fragrant shrubs and flowers. I hope to see this miracle when I return.
We came to Echelles, where we changed horses with great formality and preparation, as if setting out on some formidable expedition. Six large strong-boned horses with high haunches (used to ascend and descend mountains) were put to, the rope-tackle was examined and repaired, and our two postilions mounted and dismounted more than once, before they seemed willing to set off, which they did at last at a hand-gallop, that was continued for some miles. It is nothing to see English blood-horses get over the ground with such prodigious fleetness and spirit, but it is really curious to see the huge cart-horses, that they use for Diligences abroad, lumbering along and making the miles disappear behind them with their ponderous strength and persevering activity. The road for some way rattled under their heavy hoofs, and the heavy wheels that they dragged or whirled along at a thundering pace; the postilions cracked their whips, and the one in front (a dark, swarthy, short-set fellow) flourished his, shouted and hallooed, and turned back to vociferate his instructions to his companion with the robust energy and wildness of expression of a smuggler or a leader of banditti, carrying off a rich booty from a troop of soldiers. There was something in the scenery to favour this idea. Night was falling as we entered the superb tunnel cut through the mountain at La Grotte (a work attributed to Victor-Emanuel, with the same truth that Falstaff took to himself the merit of the death of Hotspur), and its iron floor rang, the whips cracked, and the roof echoed to the clear voice of our intrepid postilion as we dashed through it. Our path then wound among romantic defiles, where huge masses of snow and the gathering gloom threatened continually to bar our way; but it seemed cleared by the lively shout of our guide, and the carriage-wheels, clogged with ice, rolled after the heavy tramp of the horses. In this manner we rode on through a country full of wild grandeur and shadowy fears, till we had nearly reached the end of our day’s journey, when we dismissed our two fore-horses and their rider, to whom I presented a trifling douceur ‘for the sake of his good voice and cheerful countenance.’ The descent into Chambery was the most dangerous part of the road, and our horses were nearly thrown on their haunches several times. The road was narrow and slippery; there were a number of market-carts returning from the town, and there was a declivity on one side, which, though not a precipice, was quite sufficient to have dashed us to pieces in a common-place way. We arrived at Chambery in the dusk of the evening; and there is surely a charm in the name, and in that of the Charmettes near it (where he who relished all more sharply than his fellows, and made them feel for him as for themselves, alone felt peace or hope), which even the Magdalen Muse of Mr. Moore has not been able to unsing! We alighted at the inn fatigued enough, and were delighted on being shewn to a room to find the floor of wood, and English teacups and saucers. We were in Savoy.
We set out early the next morning, and it was the most trying part of our whole journey. The wind cut like a scythe through the valleys, and a cold, icy feeling struck from the sides of the snowy precipices that surrounded us, so that we seemed enclosed in a huge well of mountains. We got to St. Jean de Maurienne to breakfast about noon, where the only point agreed upon appeared to be to have nothing ready to receive us. This was the most tedious day of all; nor did we meet with any thing to repay us for our uncomfortable setting out. We travelled through a scene of desolation, were chilled in sunless valleys or dazzled by sunny mountain-tops, passed frozen streams or gloomy cavities, that might be transformed into the scene of some Gothic wizard’s spell, or reminded one of some German novel. Let no one imagine that the crossing the Alps is the work of a moment, or done by a single heroic effort—that they are a huge but detached chain of hills, or like the dotted line we find in the map. They are a sea or an entire kingdom of mountains. It took us three days to traverse them in this, which is the most practicable direction, and travelling at a good round pace. We passed on as far as eye could see, and still we appeared to have made little way. Still we were in the shadow of the same enormous mass of rock and snow, by the side of the same creeping stream. Lofty mountains reared themselves in front of us—horrid abysses were scooped out under our feet. Sometimes the road wound along the side of a steep hill, overlooking some village-spire or hamlet, and as we ascended it, it only gave us a view of remoter scenes, ‘where Alps o’er Alps arise,’ tossing about their billowy tops, and tumbling their unwieldy shapes in all directions—a world of wonders!—Any one, who is much of an egotist, ought not to travel through these districts; his vanity will not find its account in them; it will be chilled, mortified, shrunk up: but they are a noble treat to those who feel themselves raised in their own thoughts and in the scale of being by the immensity of other things, and who can aggrandise and piece out their personal insignificance by the grandeur and eternal forms of nature! It gives one a vast idea of Buonaparte to think of him in these situations. He alone (the Rob Roy of the scene) seemed a match for the elements, and able to master ‘this fortress, built by nature for herself.’ Neither impeded nor turned aside by immoveable barriers, he smote the mountains with his iron glaive, and made them malleable; cut roads through them; transported armies over their ridgy steeps; and the rocks ‘nodded to him, and did him courtesies!’
We arrived at St. Michelle at night-fall (after passing through beds of ice and the infernal regions of cold), where we met with a truly hospitable reception, with wood-floors in the English fashion, and where they told us the King of England had stopped. This made no sort of difference to me.
We breakfasted the next day (being Sunday) at Lans-le-Bourg, where I observed my friend the Spaniard busy with his tables, taking down the name of the place. The landlady was a little, round, fat, good-humoured black-eyed Italian or Savoyard, saying a number of good things to all her guests, but sparing of them otherwise. We were now at the foot of Mount Cenis, and after breakfast we set out on foot before the Diligence, which was to follow us in half an hour. We passed a melancholy-looking inn at the end of the town, professing to be kept by an Englishwoman; but there appeared to be nobody about the house, English, French, or Italian. The mistress of it (a young woman who had married an Italian) had, in fact, died a short time before of pure chagrin and disappointment in this solitary place, after having told her tale of distress to every one, till it fairly wore her out. We had leisure to look back to the town as we proceeded, and which, with its church, stone-cottages, and slated roofs, shrunk into a miniature-model of itself as we continued to advance farther and higher above it. Some straggling cottages, some vineyards planted at a great height, and another compact and well-built village, that seemed to defy the extremity of the seasons, were seen in the direction of the valley that we were pursuing. Else all around were shapeless, sightless piles of hills covered with snow, with crags or pine-trees or a foot-path peeping out, and in the appearance of which no alteration whatever was made by our advancing or receding. We gained on the mountain by a broad, winding road that continually doubles, and looks down upon the point from whence you started half an hour before. Some snow had fallen in the morning, but it was now fine, though cloudy. We found two of our fellow-travellers following our example, and they soon after overtook us. They were both French. We noticed some of the features of the scenery; and a lofty hill opposite to us being scooped out into a bed of snow, with two ridges or promontories projecting (something like an arm-chair) on each side. ‘Voilà!’ said the younger and more volatile of our companions, ‘c’est un trône, et le nuage est la gloire!‘—A white cloud indeed encircled its misty top. I complimented him on the happiness of his allusion, and said that Madame was pleased with the exactness of the resemblance. He then turned to the valley, and said, ‘C’est un berceau.’ This is the height to which the imagination of a Frenchman always soars, and it can soar no higher. Any thing that is not cast in this obvious, common-place mould, that had been used a thousand times before with applause, they think barbarous, and as they phrase it, originaire. No farther notice was taken of the scenery, any more than if we had been walking on the Boulevards at Paris, and my young Frenchman talked of other things, laughed, sung, and smoked a cigar with a gaiety and lightness of heart that I envied. ‘What has become,’ said the elder of the Frenchmen, ‘of Monsieur l’Espagnol? He does not easily quit his seat; he sits in one corner, never looks out, or if you point to any object, takes no notice of it; and when you come to the end of the stage, says—“What is the name of that place we passed by last?” takes out his pocket-book, and makes a note of it. “That is droll.”’ And what made it more so, it turned out that our Spanish friend was a painter, travelling to Rome to study the Fine Arts! All the way as we ascended, there were red posts placed at the edge of the road, ten or twelve feet in height, to point out the direction of the road in case of a heavy fall of snow, and with notches cut to shew the depth of the drifts. There were also scattered stone-hovels, erected as stations for the Gens d’armes, who were sometimes left here for several days together after a severe snow-storm, without being approached by a single human being. One of these stood near the top of the mountain, and as we were tired of the walk (which had occupied two hours) and of the uniformity of the view, we agreed to wait here for the Diligence to overtake us. We were cordially welcomed in by a young peasant (a soldier’s wife) with a complexion as fresh as the winds, and an expression as pure as the mountain-snows. The floor of this rude tenement consisted of the solid rock; and a three-legged table stood on it, on which were placed three earthen bowls filled with sparkling wine, heated on a stove with sugar. The woman stood by, and did the honours of this cheerful repast with a rustic simplicity and a pastoral grace that might have called forth the powers of Hemskirk and Raphael. I shall not soon forget the rich ruby colour of the wine, as the sun shone upon it through a low glazed window that looked out on the boundless wastes around, nor its grateful spicy smell as we sat round it. I was complaining of the trick that had been played by the waiter at Lyons in the taking of our places, when I was told by the young Frenchman, that, in case I returned to Lyons, I ought to go to the Hotel de l’Europe, or to the Hotel du Nord, ‘in which latter case he should have the honour of serving me.’ I thanked him for his information, and we set out to finish the ascent of Mount Cenis, which we did in another half-hour’s march. The traiteur of the Hotel du Nord and I had got into a brisk theatrical discussion on the comparative merits of Kean and Talma, he asserting that there was something in French acting which an English understanding could not appreciate; and I insisting loudly on bursts of passion as the forte of Talma, which was a language common to human nature; that in his Œdipus, for instance, it was not a Frenchman or an Englishman he had to represent—‘Mais c’est un homme, c’est Œdipe‘—when our cautious Spaniard brushed by us, determined to shew he could descend the mountain, if he would not ascend it on foot. His figure was characteristic enough, his motions smart and lively, and his dress composed of all the colours of the rainbow. He strutted on before us in the snow, like a flamingo or some tropical bird of variegated plumage; his dark purple cloak fluttered in the air, his Montero cap, set a little on one side, was of fawn colour; his waistcoat a bright scarlet, his coat a reddish brown, his trowsers a pea-green, and his boots a perfect yellow. He saluted us with a national politeness as he passed, and seemed bent on redeeming the sedentary sluggishness of his character by one bold and desperate effort of locomotion.
The coach shortly after overtook us. We descended a long and steep declivity, with the highest point of Mount Cenis on our left, and a lake to the right, like a landing-place for geese. Between the two was a low, white monastery, and the barrier where we had our passports inspected, and then went forward with only two stout horses and one rider. The snow on this side of the mountain was nearly gone. I supposed myself for some time nearly on level ground, till we came in view of several black chasms or steep ravines in the side of the mountain facing us, with water oozing from it, and saw through some galleries, that is, massy stone-pillars knit together by thick rails of strong timber, guarding the road-side, a perpendicular precipice below, and other galleries beyond, diminished in a fairy perspective, and descending ‘with cautious haste and giddy cunning,’ and with innumerable windings and re-duplications to an interminable depth and distance from the height where we were. The men and horses with carts, that were labouring up the path in the hollow below, shewed like crows or flies. The road we had to pass was often immediately under that we were passing, and cut from the side of what was all but a precipice out of the solid rock by the broad, firm master-hand that traced and executed this mighty work. The share that art has in the scene is as appalling as the scene itself—the strong security against danger as sublime as the danger itself. Near the turning of one of the first galleries is a beautiful waterfall, which at this time was frozen into a sheet of green pendant ice—a magical transformation. Long after we continued to descend, now faster and now slower, and came at length to a small village at the bottom of a sweeping line of road, where the houses seemed like dove-cotes with the mountain’s back reared like a wall behind them, and which I thought the termination of our journey. But here the wonder and the greatness began: for, advancing through a grove of slender trees to another point of the road, we caught a new view of the lofty mountain to our left. It stood in front of us, with its head in the skies, covered with snow, and its bare sides stretching far away into a valley that yawned at its feet, and over which we seemed suspended in mid air. The height, the magnitude, the immovableness of the objects, the wild contrast, the deep tones, the dance and play of the landscape from the change of our direction and the interposition of other striking objects, the continued recurrence of the same huge masses, like giants following us with unseen strides, stunned the sense like a blow, and yet gave the imagination strength to contend with a force that mocked it. Here immeasurable columns of reddish granite shelved from the mountain’s sides; here they were covered and stained with furze and other shrubs; here a chalky cliff shewed a fir-grove climbing its tall sides, and that itself looked at a distance like a huge, branching pine-tree; beyond was a dark, projecting knoll, or hilly promontory, that threatened to bound the perspective—but, on drawing nearer to it, the cloudy vapour that shrouded it (as it were) retired, and opened another vista beyond, that, in its own unfathomed depth, and in the gradual obscurity of twilight, resembled the uncertain gloom of the back-ground of some fine picture. At the bottom of this valley crept a sluggish stream, and a monastery or low castle stood upon its banks. The effect was altogether grander than I had any conception of. It was not the idea of height or elevation that was obtruded upon the mind and staggered it, but we seemed to be descending into the bowels of the earth—its foundations seemed to be laid bare to the centre; and abyss after abyss, a vast, shadowy, interminable space, opened to receive us. We saw the building up and frame-work of the world—its limbs, its ponderous masses, and mighty proportions, raised stage upon stage, and we might be said to have passed into an unknown sphere, and beyond mortal limits. As we rode down our winding, circuitous path, our baggage, (which had been taken off) moved on before us; a grey horse that had got loose from the stable followed it, and as we whirled round the different turnings in this rapid, mechanical flight, at the same rate and the same distance from each other, there seemed something like witchcraft in the scene and in our progress through it. The moon had risen, and threw its gleams across the fading twilight; the snowy tops of the mountains were blended with the clouds and stars; their sides were shrouded in mysterious gloom, and it was not till we entered Susa, with its fine old drawbridge and castellated walls, that we found ourselves on terra firma, or breathed common air again. At the inn at Susa, we first perceived the difference of Italian manners; and the next day arrived at Turin, after passing over thirty miles of the straightest, flattest, and dullest road in the world. Here we stopped two days to recruit our strength and look about us.
Chapter XV
My arrival at Turin was the first and only moment of intoxication I have found in Italy. It is a city of palaces. After a change of dress (which, at the end of a long journey, is a great luxury) I walked out, and traversing several clean, spacious streets, came to a promenade outside the town, from which I saw the chain of Alps we had left behind us, rising like a range of marble pillars in the evening sky. Monte Viso and Mount Cenis resembled two pointed cones of ice, shooting up above all the rest. I could distinguish the broad and rapid Po, winding along at the other extremity of the walk, through vineyards and meadow grounds. The trees had on that deep sad foliage, which takes a mellower tinge from being prolonged into the midst of winter, and which I had only seen in pictures. A Monk was walking in a solitary grove at a little distance from the common path. The air was soft and balmy, and I felt transported to another climate—another earth—another sky. The winter was suddenly changed to spring. It was as if I had to begin my life anew. Several young Italian women were walking on the terrace, in English dresses, and with graceful downcast looks, in which you might fancy that you read the soul of the Decameron. It was a fine, serious grace, equally remote from French levity and English sullenness, but it was the last I saw of it. I have run the gauntlet of vulgar shapes and horrid faces ever since. The women in Italy (so far as I have seen hitherto) are detestably ugly. They are not even dark and swarthy, but a mixture of brown and red, coarse, marked with the small pox, with pug-features, awkward, ill-made, fierce, dirty, lazy, neither attempting nor hoping to please. Italian beauty (if there is, as I am credibly informed, such a thing) is retired, conventual, denied to the common gaze. It was and it remains a dream to me, a vision of the brain! I returned to the inn (the Pension Suisse) in high spirits, and made a most luxuriant dinner. We had a wild duck equal to what we had in Paris, and the grapes were the finest I ever tasted. Afterwards we went to the Opera, and saw a ballet of action (out-heroding Herod) with all the extravagance of incessant dumb-show and noise, the glittering of armour, the burning of castles, the clattering of horses on and off the stage, and heroines like furies in hysterics. Nothing at Bartholomew Fair was ever in worse taste, noisier, or finer. It was as if a whole people had buried their understandings, their imaginations, and their hearts in their senses; and as if the latter were so jaded and worn out, that they required to be inflamed, dazzled, and urged almost to a kind of frenzy-fever, to feel any thing. The house was crowded to excess, and dark, all but the stage, which shed a dim, ghastly light on the gilt boxes and the audience. Milton might easily have taken his idea of Pandemonium from the inside of an Italian Theatre, its heat, its gorgeousness, and its gloom. We were at the back of the pit, in which there was only standing room, and leaned against the first row of boxes, full of the Piedmontese Nobility, who talked fast and loud in their harsh guttural dialect, in spite of the repeated admonitions of ‘a gentle usher, Authority by name,’ who every five seconds hissed some lady of quality and high breeding whose voice was heard with an éclat above all the rest. No notice whatever was taken of the acting or the singing (which was any thing but Italian, unless Italian at present means a bad imitation of the French) till a comic dance attracted all eyes, and drew forth bursts of enthusiastic approbation. I do not know the performers’ names, but a short, squat fellow (a kind of pollard of the green-room) dressed in a brown linsey-woolsey doublet and hose, with round head, round shoulders, short arms and short legs, made love to a fine die-away lady, dressed up in the hoops, lappets and furbelows of the last age, and stumped, nodded, pulled and tugged at his mistress with laudable perseverance, and in determined opposition to the awkward, mawkish graces of an Adonis of a rival, with flowing locks, pink ribbons, yellow kerseymere breeches, and an insipid expression of the utmost distress. It was an admirable grotesque and fantastic piece of pantomime humour. The little fellow who played the Clown, certainly entered into the part with infinite adroitness and spirit. He merited the teres et rotundus of the poet. He bounded over the stage like a foot-ball, rolled himself up like a hedge-hog, stuck his arms in his sides like fins, rolled his eyes in his head like bullets—and the involuntary plaudits of the audience witnessed the success of his efforts at once to electrify and stultify them! The only annoyance I found at Turin was the number of beggars who are stuck against the walls like fixtures, and expose their diseased, distorted limbs, with no more remorse or feeling than if they did not belong to them, deafening you with one wearisome cry the whole day long.
We were fortunate enough to find a voiture going from Geneva to Florence, with an English lady and her niece—I bargained for the two remaining places for ten guineas, and the journey turned out pleasantly, I believe, to all parties; I am sure it did so to us. We were to be eight days on the road, and to stop two days to rest, once at Parma, and once at Bologna, to see the pictures. Having made this arrangement, I was proceeding over the bridge towards the Observatory that commands a view of the town and the whole surrounding country, and had quite forgotten that I had such a thing as a passport to take with me. I found, however, I had no fewer than four signatures to procure, besides the six that were already tacked to my passport, before I could proceed, and which I had some difficulty in obtaining in time to set out on the following morning. The hurry I was thrown into by this circumstance prevented me from seeing some fine Rembrandts, Spagnolettos and Caraccis, which I was told are to be found in the Palace of Prince Carignani and elsewhere. I received this piece of information from my friend the Spaniard, who called on me to inquire my proposed route, and to ‘testify,’ as he said, ‘his respect for the English character.’ Shall I own it? I who flout, rail at, and contemn the English, was more pleased with this compliment paid to me in my national character, than with any I ever received on the score of personal civility. My fellow-traveller was for Genoa and Milan; I for Florence: but we were to meet at Rome.
The next morning was clear and frosty, and the sun shone bright into the windows of the voiture, as we left Turin, and proceeded for some miles at a gentle pace along the banks of the Po. The road was level and excellent, and we met a number of market people with mules and yokes of oxen. There were some hills crowned with villas; some bits of traditional Italian scenery now and then; but in general you would not know but that you were in England, except from the greater clearness and lightness of the air. We breakfasted at the first town we came to, in two separate English groups, and I could not help being struck with the manner of our reception at an Italian inn, which had an air of indifference, insolence, and hollow swaggering about it, as much as to say, ‘Well, what do you think of us Italians? Whatever you think, we care very little about the matter!’ The French are a politer people than the Italians—the English are honester; but I may as well postpone these comparisons till my return. The room smoked, and the waiter insisted on having the windows and the door open, in spite of my remonstrances to the contrary. He flung in and out of the room as if he had a great opinion of himself, and wished to express it by a braggadocio air. The partridges, coffee, cheese and grapes, on which we breakfasted à la fourchette, were, however, excellent. I said so, but the acknowledgment seemed to be considered as superfluous by our attendant, who received five francs for his master, and one for himself, with an air of condescending patronage. In consequence of something being said about our passports, he relaxed in the solemnity of his deportment, and observed that ‘he had been once near being engaged as valet to an English gentleman, at Ostend; that he had but three hours to procure his passport, but while he was getting it, the ship sailed, and he lost his situation.’ Such was my first impression of Italian inns and waiters, and I have seen nothing since materially to alter it. They receive you with a mixture of familiarity and fierceness, and instead of expecting any great civility from them, they excite that sort of uncomfortable sensation as to the footing you are upon, that you are glad to get away without meeting with some affront. There is either a fawning sleekness, which looks like design, or an insolence, which looks as if they had you in their power. In Switzerland and Savoy you are waited on by women; in Italy by men. I cannot say I like the exchange. From Turin to Florence, only one girl entered the room, and she (not to mend the matter) was a very pretty one.—I was told at the office of Messrs. Bonnafoux at Turin, that travelling to Rome by a vetturino was highly dangerous, and that their Diligence was guarded by four carabineers, to defend it from the banditti. I saw none, nor the appearance of any thing that looked like a robber, except a bare-foot friar, who suddenly sprang out of a hedge by the road-side, with a somewhat wild and haggard appearance, which a little startled me. Instead of finding a thief concealed behind each bush, or a Salvator Rosa face scowling from a ruined hovel, or peeping from a jutting crag at every turn, there is an excellent turnpike-road all the way, three-fourths perfectly level, skirted with hedges, corn-fields, orchards and vineyards, populous with hamlets and villages, with labourers at work in the fields, and with crowds of peasants in gay, picturesque attire, and with healthy, cheerful, open, but manly countenances, passing along, either to or from the different market-towns. It was Carnival time; and as we travelled on, we were struck with the variety of rich dresses, red, yellow, and green, the high-plaited head-dresses of the women, some in the shape of helmets, with pins stuck in them like skewers, with gold crosses at their bosoms, and large muffs on their hands, who poured from the principal towns along the high-road, or turned off towards some village-spire in the distance, chequering the landscape with their gaily-tinted groups. They often turned back and laughed as we drove by them, or passed thoughtfully on without noticing us, but assuredly showed no signs of an intention to rob or murder us. Even in the Apennines, though the road is rugged and desolate, it is lined with farm-houses and towns at small distances; and there is but one house all the way that is stained by the recollection of a tragic catastrophe. How it may be farther south, I cannot say; but so far, the reports to alarm strangers are (to the best of my observation and conjecture) totally unfounded.
We had left the Alps behind us, the white tops of which we still saw scarcely distinguishable from ridges of rolling clouds, and that seemed to follow us like a formidable enemy, and almost enclose us in a semicircle; and we had the Apennines in front, that, gradually emerging from the horizon, opposed their undulating barrier to our future progress, with shadowy shapes of danger and Covigliaijo lurking in the midst of them. All the space between these two, for at least 150 miles (I should suppose) is one level cultivated plain, one continuous garden. This became more remarkably the case, as we entered the territories of Maria-Louisa (the little States of Parma and Placentia) when, for two whole days, we literally travelled through an uninterrupted succession of corn-fields, vineyards and orchards, all in the highest state of cultivation, with the hedges neatly clipped into a kind of trellis-work, and the vines hanging in festoons from tree to tree, or clinging ‘with marriageable arms’ round the branches of each regularly planted and friendly support. It was more like passing through a number of orchard-plots or garden-grounds in the neighbourhood of some great city (such as London) than making a journey through a wide and extensive tract of country. Not a common came in sight, nor a single foot of waste or indifferent ground. It became tedious at last from the richness, the neatness, and the uniformity; for the whole was worked up to an ideal model, and so exactly a counterpart of itself, that it was like looking out of a window at the same identical spot, instead of passing on to new objects every instant. We were saturated even with beauty and comfort, and were disposed to repeat the wish—
‘To-morrow to fresh fields and pastures new.’
A white square villa, or better sort of farm-house, sometimes stared on us from the end of a long, strait avenue of poplars, standing in ostentatious, unadorned nakedness, and in a stiff, meagre, and very singular taste. What is the cause of the predilection of the Italians for straight lines and unsheltered walls? Is it for the sake of security or vanity? The desire of seeing everything or of being seen by every one? The only thing that broke the uniformity of the scene, or gave an appearance of wretchedness or neglect to the country, was the number of dry beds of the torrents of melted snow and ice that came down from the mountains in the breaking up of the winter, and that stretched their wide, comfortless, unprofitable length across these valleys in their progress to the Adriatic. Some of them were half a mile in breadth, and had stately bridges over them, with innumerable arches—(the work, it seems, of Maria Louisa) some of which we crossed over, others we rode under. We approached the first of them by moonlight, and the effect of the long, white, glimmering, sepulchral arches was as ghastly then as it is dreary in the day-time. There is something almost preternatural in the sensation they excite, particularly when your nerves have been agitated and harassed during several days’ journey, and you are disposed to startle at everything in a questionable shape. You do not know what to make of them. They seem like the skeletons of bridges over the dry bones and dusty relics of rivers. It is as if some mighty concussion of the earth had swept away the water, and left the bridge standing in stiffened horror over it. It is a new species of desolation, as flat, dull, disheartening, and hopeless as can be imagined. Mr. Crabbe should travel post to Italy on purpose to describe it, and to add it to his list of prosaic horrors. While here, he might also try his hand upon an Italian vintage, and if he does not squeeze the juice and spirit out of it, and leave nothing but the husk and stalks, I am much mistaken. As we groped our way under the stony ribs of the first of these structures that we came to, one of the arches within which the moonlight fell, presented a momentary appearance of a woman in a white dress and hood, stooping to gather stones. I wish I had the petrific pencil of the ingenious artist above-named, that I might imbody this flitting shadow in a permanent form.
It was late on the fourth day (Saturday) before we reached Parma. Our two black, glossy, easy-going horses were tired of the sameness or length of the way; and our guide appeared to have forgotten it, for we entered the capital of the Archduchy without his being aware of it. We went to the Peacock Inn, where we were shewn into a very fine but faded apartment, and where we stopped the whole of the next day. Here, for the first time on our journey, we found a carpet, which, however, stuck to the tiled floor with dirt and age. There was a lofty bed, with a crimson silk canopy, a marble table, looking-glasses of all sizes and in every direction,[37] and excellent coffee, fruit, game, bread and wine at a moderate rate—that is to say, our supper the first night, our breakfast, dinner, and coffee the next day, and coffee the following morning, with lodging and fire, came to twenty-three francs. It would have cost more than double in England in the same circumstances. We had an exhilarating view from our window of the street and great square. It was full of noise and bustle. The people were standing in lounging attitudes by themselves, or talking loud in groups, and with great animation. The expression of character seemed to be natural and unaffected. Every one appeared to follow the bent of his own humour and feelings (good or bad) and I did not perceive any of that smirking grimace and varnish of affectation and self-complacency, which glitters in the face and manners of every Frenchman, and makes them so many enemies. If an individual is inordinately delighted with himself, do not others laugh at and take a dislike to him? Must it not be equally so with a nation enamoured of itself?—The women that I saw did not answer to my expectations. They had high shoulders, thick waists, and shambling feet, or that crapaudeux shape, which is odious to see or think of. The men looked better, and I saw little difference between them and the English, except a greater degree of fire and spirit. The priests had many of them (both here and at Turin) fine faces, with a jovial expression of good humour and good living, or of subtle thought and painful watching, studious to keep the good things that enriched the veins and pampered the pride of the brotherhood. Here we saw the whole market-place kneel down as the host passed by. Being Carnival time, high mass was celebrated at the principal churches, and Moses in Egypt was given at the Opera in the evening. The day before, as we entered Parma in the dusk, we saw a procession of flambeaux at a distance, which denoted a funeral. The processions are often joined by persons of the highest quality in disguise, who make a practice of performing penance, or expiating some offence by attending the obsequies of the dead. This custom may be ridiculed as superstitious by an excess of Protestant zeal; but the moralist will hardly blame what shews a sense of human infirmity, and owns something ‘serious in mortality;’ and is besides freed from the suspicion of ostentation or hypocrisy. Lord Glenallan, in ‘The Antiquary,’ has been censured on the same principle, as an excrescence of morbid and superannuated superstition. Honi soit qui mal y pense. When human nature is no longer liable to such misfortunes, our sympathy with them will then be superfluous—we may dry up our tears, and stifle our sighs. In the mean time, they who enlarge our sympathy with others, or deepen it for ourselves from lofty, imaginary sources, are the true teachers of morality, and benefactors of mankind, were they twenty times tools and Tories. It is not the shutting up of hospitals, but the opening of the human heart, that will lead to the regeneration of the world[38]!
It was at Parma I first noticed the women looking out of the windows (not one or two stragglers, but two or three from every house) where they hang like signs or pictures, stretching their necks out, or confined, like children by iron bars, often with cushions to lean upon, scaldalettos dangling from their hands (another vile custom). This seems to shew a prodigious predominance of the organ of sight, or a want of something to do or to think of. In France, the passion of the women is not to see, but to talk. In Hogarth, you perceive some symptoms of the same prurience of the optic nerve, and willingness to take in knowledge at the entrance of the eyes. It certainly has a great look of ignorance, indolence, and vulgarity. In summer time, perhaps, the practice might be natural—in winter, the habit is quite unaccountable. I thought, at first, it might be one of the abuses of the Carnival; but the Carnival is over, and the windows are still lined with eyes and heads—that do not like the trouble of putting on a cap.
We were told we could see her Majesty at mass, (so her dutiful subjects call the Archduchess) and we went to see the daughter of a sovereign, the self-devoted consort of one who only lost himself by taking upon him a degrading equality with Emperors and Kings. We had a Cicerone with us, who led us, without ceremony, to a place in the chapel, where we could command a full view of Maria Louisa, and which we made use of without much reserve. She knelt, or stood, in the middle of a small gallery, with attendants, male and female, on each side of her. We saw her distinctly for several minutes. She has full fair features, not handsome, but with a mild, unassuming expression, tinged with thoughtfulness. She appears about forty; she seemed to cast a wistful look at us, being strangers and English people—
‘Methought she looked at us— So every one believes, that sees a Duchess!’—OLD PLAY.
There are some not very pleasant rumours circulated of her. She must have had something of the heroine of the Cid about her. She married the man who had conquered her father. She is said to have leaned on the Duke of Wellington’s arm. After that, she might do whatever she pleased. Perhaps these stories are only circulated to degrade her; or, perhaps, a scheme may have been laid to degrade her in reality, by the persons nearest to her, and most interested in, but most jealous of, her honour! We were invited to see the cradle of the little Napoleon, which I declined; and we then went to see the new gallery which the Archduchess has built for her pictures, in which there is a bust of herself, by Canova. Here I saw a number of pictures, and among others the Correggios and the celebrated St. Jerome, which I had seen at Paris. I must have been out of tune; for my disappointment and my consequent mortification were extreme. I had never thought Correggio a God; but I had attributed this to my own inexperience and want of taste, and I hoped by this time to have ripened into that full idolatry of him expressed by Mengs and others. Instead of which, his pictures (they stood on the ground without frames, and in a bad light) appeared to be comparatively mean, feeble, and affected. There is the master-hand, no doubt, but tremulous with artificial airs—beauty and grace carried to a pitch of quaintness and conceit—the expression of joy or woe, but lost in a doting contemplation of its own ecstasy or agony, and after being raised to the height of truth and nature, hurried over the brink of refinement into effeminacy, by a craving after impossibilities, and a wanton dalliance with the ideal. Correggio has painted the wreathed smile of sweetness, but he does not stop till he has contorted it into affectation; he has expressed the utmost distress and despondency of soul, but it is the weakness of suffering without the strength. His pictures are so perfect and delicate, that ‘the sense aches at them;’ and in his efforts after refinement, he has worked himself up into a state of languid, nervous irritability, which is reflected back upon the spectator. These remarks appeared to me applicable in their full force to the St. Jerome, the Taking down from the Cross, and the Martyrdom of St. Placide, in which there is an executioner with his back turned, in a chiaro-scuro of the most marvellous clearness and beauty. In all these there is a want of manly firmness and simplicity. He might be supposed to have touched, at some period of his progress, on the highest point of excellence, and then to have spoiled all by a wish to go farther, without knowing how or why. Perhaps modesty, or an ignorance of what others had done, or of what the art could do, was at the foundation of this, and prevented him from knowing where to stop. Perhaps he had too refined and tender a susceptibility, or ideas of sanctity and sweetness beyond the power of his art to express; and in the attempt to reconcile the mechanical and ideal, failed from an excess of feeling! I saw nothing else to please me, and I was sorry I had come so far to have my faith in great names and immortal works misgive me. I was ready to exclaim, ‘Oh painting! I thought thee a substance, and I find thee a shadow!’ There was, however, a Crowning of the Virgin, a fresco (by Correggio) from the Church of St. Paul, which was full of majesty, sweetness, and grace; and in this, and the heads of boys and fawns, in the Chase of Diana, there is a freedom and breadth of execution, owing to the mode in which they were painted, and which makes them seem pure emanations of the mind, without anything overdone, finical, or little. The cupola of St. Paul’s, painted by Correggio in fresco, is quite destroyed, or the figures flutter in idle fragments from the walls. Most of the other pictures in this church were in a tawdry, meretricious style. I was beginning to think that painting was not calculated for churches, coloured surfaces not agreeing with solid pillars and masses of architecture, and also that Italian art was less severe, and more a puppet-show business than I had thought it. I was not a little tired of the painted shrines and paltry images of the Virgin at every hundred yards as we rode along. But if my thoughts were veering to this cheerless, attenuated speculation of nothingness and vanity, they were called back by the sight of the Farnese Theatre—the noblest and most striking monument I have seen of the golden age of Italy. It was built by one of the Farnese family about the fifteenth or sixteenth century, and would hold eight thousand spectators. It is cold, empty, silent as the receptacles of the dead. The walls, roofs, rafters, and even seats, remain perfect; but the tide of population and of wealth, the pomp and pride of patronage and power, seemed to have turned another way, and to have left it a deserted pile, that would, long ere this, have mouldered into ruin and decay, but that its original strength and vast proportions would not suffer it—a lasting proof of the magnificence of a former age, and of the degeneracy of this! The streets of Parma are beautiful, airy, clean, spacious; the churches elegant; and the walls around it picturesque and delightful. The walls and ramparts, with the gardens and vineyards close to them, have a most romantic effect; and we saw, on a flight of steps near one of the barriers, a group of men, women, and children, that for expression, composition, and colouring rivalled any thing in painting. We here also observed the extreme clearness and brilliancy of the southern atmosphere: the line of hills in the western horizon was distinguished from the sky by a tint so fine that it was barely perceptible.
Bologna is even superior to Parma. If its streets are less stately, its public buildings are more picturesque and varied; and its long arcades, its porticos, and silent walks are a perpetual feast to the eye and the imagination. At Parma (as well as Turin) you see a whole street at once, and have a magical and imposing effect produced once for all. At Bologna you meet with a number of surprises; new beauties unfold themselves, a perspective is gradually prolonged, or branches off by some retired and casual opening, winding its heedless way—the rus in urbe—where leisure might be supposed to dwell with learning. Here is the Falling Tower, and the Neptune of John of Bologna, in the great square. Going along, we met Professor Mezzofanti, who is said to understand thirty-eight languages, English among the rest. He was pointed out to us as a prodigious curiosity by our guide, (Signor Gatti) who has this pleasantry at his tongue’s end, that ‘there is one Raphael to paint, one Mezzofanti to understand languages, and one Signor Gatti to explain everything they wish to know to strangers.’ We went under the guidance of this accomplished person, and in company of our fellow-travellers, to the Academy, and to the collection of the Marquis Zampieri. In the last there is not a single picture worth seeing, except some old and curious ones of Giotto and Ghirlandaio. One cannot look at these performances (imperfect as they are, with nothing but the high endeavour, the fixed purpose stamped on them, like the attempts of a deformed person at grace) with sufficient veneration, when one considers what they must have cost their authors, or what they have enabled others to do. If Giotto could have seen the works of Raphael or Correggio, would he not have laughed or wept? Yet Raphael and Correggio should have bowed the head to him, for without those first rude beginners and dumb creators of the art, they themselves would never have been!—What amused us here was a sort of wild Meg Merrilies of a woman, in a grey coarse dress, and with grey matted hair, that sprang out of a dungeon of a porter’s lodge, and seizing upon Madame ——, dragged her by the arm up the staircase, with unrestrained familiarity and delight. We thought it was some one who presumed on old acquaintance, and was overjoyed at seeing Madame —— a second time. It was the mere spirit of good fellowship, and the excess of high animal spirits. No woman in England would dream of such an extravagance, who was not mad or drunk. She afterwards followed us about the rooms; and though she rather slunk behind, being somewhat abashed by our evident wish to shake her off, she still seemed to watch for an opportunity to dart upon some one, like an animal whose fondness you cannot get rid of by repeated repulses.[39] There is a childishness and want of self-control about the Italians, which has an appearance of folly or craziness. We passed a group of women on the road, and though there was something odd in their dress and manner, it was not for some time that we discovered that they were insane persons, walking out under the charge of keepers, from a greater degree of vacant vivacity, or thoughtful abstraction than usual.
To return. The Collection of Pictures in the Academy is worthy of Italy and of Bologna. It is chiefly of the Bolognese school; or in that fine, sombre, shadowy tone that seems reflected from sacred subjects or from legendary lore, that corresponds with crucifixions and martyrdoms, that points to skyey glories or hovers round conventual gloom. Here is the St. Cecilia of Raphael (of which the engraving conveys a faithful idea), several Caraccis, Domenichino’s St. Teresa, and his St. Peter Martyr, (a respectable, not a formidable rival of Titian’s) a Sampson, by Guido (an ill-chosen subject, finely coloured) and the Five Patron-Saints of Bologna, by the same, a very large, finely-painted and impressive picture, occupying the end of the Gallery. Four out of five of the Saints are admirable old Monkish heads (even their very cowls seem to think): the Dead Christ above has a fine monumental effect; and the whole picture, compared with this master’s general style, is like ‘the cathedral’s gloom and choir,’ compared with sunny smiles and the shepherd’s pipe upon the mountains. I left this Gallery, once more reconciled to my favourite art. Guido also gains upon me, because I continually see fine pictures of his. ‘By their works ye shall know them,’ is a fair rule for judging of painters or men.
There is a side pavement at Bologna, Modena, and most of the other towns in Italy, so that you do not walk, as in Paris, in continual dread of being run over. The shops have a neat appearance, and are well supplied with the ordinary necessaries of life, fruit, poultry, bread, onions or garlick, cheese and sausages. The butchers’ shops look much as they do in England. There is a technical description of the chief towns in Italy, which those who learn the Italian Grammar are told to get by heart—Genoa la superba, Bologna la dotta, Ravenna l’antica, Firense la bella, Roma la santa. Some of these I have seen, and others not; and those that I have not seen seem to me the finest. Does not this list convey as good an idea of these places as one can well have? It selects some one distinct feature of them, and that the best. Words may be said, after all, to be the finest things in the world. Things themselves are but a lower species of words, exhibiting the grossnesses and details of matter. Yet, if there be any country answering to the description or idea of it, it is Italy; and to this theory, I must add, the Alps are also a proud exception.
Chapter XVI
We left Bologna on our way to Florence in the afternoon, that we might cross the Apennines the following day. High Mass had been celebrated at Bologna; it was a kind of gala day, and the road was lined with flocks of country-people returning to their homes. At the first village we came to among the hills, we saw, talking to her companions by the road-side, the only very handsome Italian we have yet seen. It was not the true Italian face neither, dark and oval, but more like the face of an English peasant, with heightened grace and animation, with sparkling eyes, white teeth, a complexion breathing health,
——‘And when she spake, Betwixt the pearls and rubies softly brake A silver sound, which heavenly music seem’d to make.’
Our voiture was ascending a hill; and as she walked by the side of it with elastic step, and a bloom like the suffusion of a rosy cloud, the sight of her was doubly welcome, in this land of dingy complexions, squat features, scowling eye-brows and round shoulders.
We slept at ——, nine miles from Bologna, and set off early the next morning, that we might have the whole day before us. The moon, which had lighted on us on our way the preceding evening, still hung over the western horizon, its yellow orb nigh dropping behind the snowy peaks of the highest Apennines, while the sun was rising with dazzling splendour behind a craggy steep that overhung the frozen road we were passing over. The white tops of the Apennines, covered with hoar-frost gleamed in the misty morning. There was a delightful freshness and novelty in the scene. The Apennines have not the vastness nor the unity of effect of the Alps; but are broken up into a number of abrupt projecting points, that crossing one another, and presenting new combinations as the traveller shifts his position, produce, though a less sublime and imposing, a more varied and picturesque effect. A brook brawled down the precipice on the road-side, a pine-tree or mountain-ash hung over it, and shewed the valley below in a more distant, airy perspective; on the point of a rock half-way down was perched some village-spire or ruined battlement, while hamlets and farm-houses were sheltered in the bosom of the vale far below: a pine-forest rose on the sides of the mountain above, or a bleak tract of brown heath or dark morass was contrasted with the clear pearly tints of the snowy ridges in the higher distance, above which some still loftier peak saluted the sky, tinged with a rosy light.—Such were nearly the features of the landscape all round, and for several miles; and though we constantly ascended and descended a very winding road, and caught an object now in contact with one part of the scene, now giving relief to another, at one time at a considerable distance beneath our feet, and soon after soaring as high above our heads, yet the elements of beauty or of wildness being the same, the coup d’œil, though constantly changing, was as often repeated, and we at length grew tired of a scenery that still seemed another and the same. One of our pleasantest employments was to remark the teams of oxen and carts that we had lately passed, winding down a declivity in our rear, or suspended on the edge of a precipice, that on the spot we had mistaken for level ground. We had some difficulty too with our driver, who had talked gallantly over-night of hiring a couple of oxen to draw us up the mountain; but when it came to the push, his heart failed him, and his Swiss economy prevailed. In addition to his habitual closeness, the windfall of the ten guineas, which was beyond his expectations, had whetted his appetite for gain, and he appeared determined to make a good thing of his present journey. He pretended to bargain with several of the owners, but from his beating them down to the lowest fraction, nothing ever came of it, and when from the thawing of the ice in the sun, the inconvenience became serious, so that we were several times obliged to get out and walk, to enable the horses to proceed with the carriage, he said it was too late. The country now grew wilder, and the day gloomy. It was three o’clock before we stopped at Pietra Mala to have our luggage examined on entering the Tuscan States; and here we resolved to breakfast, instead of proceeding four miles farther to Covigliaio, where, though we did not choose to pass the night, we had proposed to regale our waking imaginations with a thrilling recollection of the superstitious terrors of the spot, at ease and in safety. Our reception at Pietra Mala was frightful enough; the rooms were cold and empty, and we were met with a vacant stare or with sullen frowns, in lieu of any better welcome. I have since thought that these were probably the consequence of the contempt and ill-humour shewn by other English travellers at the desolateness of the place, and the apparent want of accommodation; for, as the fire of brushwood was lighted, and the eggs, bread, and coffee were brought in by degrees, and we expressed our satisfaction in them, the cloud on the brow of our reluctant entertainers vanished, and melted into thankful smiles. There was still an air of mystery, of bustle, and inattention about the house; persons of both sexes, and of every age, passed and repassed through our sitting room to an inner chamber with looks of anxiety and importance, and we learned at length that the mistress of the inn had been, half an hour before, brought to bed of a fine boy!
We had now to mount the longest and steepest ascent of the Apennines; and Jaques, who began to be alarmed at the accounts of the state of the road, and at the increasing gloom of the weather, by a great effort of magnanimity had a yoke of oxen put to, and afterwards another horse, to drag us up the worst part; but as soon as he could find an excuse he dismissed both, and we crawled and stumbled on as before. The hills were covered with a dense cloud of sleet and vapour driven before the blast, that wrapped us round, and hung like a blanket or (if the reader pleases) a dark curtain over the more distant range of mountains. On our right were high ledges of frowning rocks, ‘cloud-clapt,’ and the summits impervious to the sight—on our farthest left, an opening was made which showed a milder sky, evening clouds pillowed on rocks, and a chain of lofty peaks basking in the rays of the setting sun; between, and in the valley below, there was nothing to be seen but mist and crag and grim desolation with the lowering symptoms of the impending storm. We felt uncomfortable, for the increased violence of the wind or thickening of the fog would have presented serious obstacles to our farther progress, which became every moment more necessary as the evening closed in—as it was, we only saw a few yards of the road distinctly before us, which cleared as we advanced forward; and at the side there was sometimes a precipice, beyond which we could distinguish nothing but mist, so that we seemed to be travelling along the edge of the world. The feeling was more striking than agreeable. Our horses were blinded by the mist, which drove furiously against them, and were nearly exhausted with continued exertion. At length, when we had arrived near the very top of the mountain, we had to cross a few yards of very slippery ice, which became a matter of considerable doubt and difficulty.—The horses could hardly keep their feet in straining to move forward, and if one of them had fallen and been hurt, the accident might have detained us on the middle of the mountain, without any aid near, or made it so late that the descent on the other side would have been dangerous. Luckily, a desperate effort succeeded, and we gained the summit of the hill without accident. We had still some miles to go, and we descended rapidly down on the other side, congratulating ourselves that we had daylight to distinguish the road from the abyss that often skirted it. About half-way down we emerged, to our great delight, from the mist (or brouillard, as it is called) that had hitherto enveloped us, and the valley opened at our feet in dim but welcome perspective. We proceeded more leisurely on to La Maschere, having escaped the dangers threatened us from precipices and robbers, and drove into a spacious covered court-yard belonging to the inn, where we were safely housed like a flock of sheep folded for the night. The inn at La Maschere is, like many of the inns in Italy, a set of wide dilapidated halls, without furniture, but with quantities of old and bad pictures, portraits or histories. The people (the attendants here were women) were obliging and good-humoured, though we could procure neither eggs nor milk with our coffee, but were compelled to have it black. We were put into a sitting-room with three beds in it without curtains, as they had no other with a fire-place disengaged, and which, with the coverlids like horse-cloths, and the strong smell of the leaves of Indian corn with which they were stuffed, brought to one’s mind the idea of a three-stalled stable. We were refreshed, however, for we slept securely; and we entered upon the last stage betimes the following day, less exhausted than we had been by the first. We had left the unqualified desolation and unbroken irregularity of the Apennines behind us; but we were still occasionally treated with a rocky cliff, a pine-grove, a mountain-torrent; while there was no end of sloping hills with old ruins or modern villas upon them, of farm-houses built in the Tuscan taste, of gliding streams with bridges over them, of meadow-grounds, and thick plantations of olives and cypresses by the road side.
After being gratified for some hours with the cultivated beauty of the scene (rendered more striking by contrast with our late perils), we came to the brow of the hill overlooking Florence, which lay under us, a scene of enchantment, a city planted in a garden, and resembling a rich and varied suburb. The whole presented a brilliant amphitheatre of hill and vale, of buildings, groves, and terraces. The circling heights were crowned with sparkling villas; the varying landscape, above or below, waved in an endless succession of olive-grounds. The olive is not unlike the common willow in shape or colour, and being still in leaf, gave to the middle of winter the appearance of a grey summer. In the midst, the Duomo and other churches raised their heads; vineyards and olive-grounds climbed the hills opposite till they joined a snowy ridge of Apennines rising above the top of Fesole; one plantation or row of trees after another fringed the ground, like rich lace; though you saw it not, there flowed the Arno; every thing was on the noblest scale, yet finished in the minutest part—the perfection of nature and of art, populous, splendid, full of life, yet simple, airy, embowered. Florence in itself is inferior to Bologna, and some other towns; but the view of it and of the immediate neighbourhood is superior to any I have seen. It is, indeed, quite delicious, and presents an endless variety of enchanting walks. It is not merely the number or the exquisiteness or admirable combination of the objects, their forms or colour, but every spot is rich in associations at once the most classical and romantic. From my friend L. H.’s house at Moiano, you see at one view the village of Setiniano, belonging to Michael Angelo’s family, the house in which Machiavel lived, and that where Boccaccio wrote, two ruined castles, in which the rival families of the Gerardeschi and the —— carried on the most deadly strife, and which seem as though they might still rear their mouldering heads against each other; and not far from this the Valley of Ladies (the scene of The Decameron), and Fesole, with the mountains of Perugia beyond. With a view like this, one may think one’s sight ‘enriched,’ in Burns’s phrase. On the ascent towards Fesole is the house where Galileo lived, and where he was imprisoned after his release from the Inquisition, at the time Milton saw him.[40] In the town itself are Michael Angelo’s house, the Baptistery, the gates of which he thought worthy to be the gates of Paradise, the Duomo, older than St. Peter’s, the ancient Palace of the Medici family, the Palace Pitti, and here also stands the statue that ‘enchants the world.’ The view along the Arno is certainly delightful, though somewhat confined, and the bridges over it grotesque and old, but beautiful.
The streets of Florence are paved entirely with flag-stones, and it has an odd effect at first to see the horses and carriages drive over them. You get out of their way, however, more easily than in Paris, from not having the slipperiness of the stones to contend with. The streets get dirty after a slight shower, and the next day you have clouds of dust again. Many of the narrower streets are like lofty paved courts, cut through a solid quarry of stone. In general, the public buildings are old, and striking chiefly from their massiness and the quaintness of the style and ornaments. Florence is like a town that has survived itself. It is distinguished by the remains of early and rude grandeur; it is left where it was three hundred years ago. Its history does not seem brought down to the present period. On entering it, you may imagine yourself enclosed in a besieged town; if you turn down any of its inferior streets, you feel as if you might meet the plague still lurking there. Even the walks out of the town are mostly between high stone-walls, which are a bad substitute for hedges. The best and most fashionable is that along the river-side; and the gay dresses and glittering equipages passing under the tall cedar-trees, and with the purple hills in the distance for a back-ground, produce a delightful effect, particularly when seen from the opposite side of the river. The carriages in Florence are numerous and splendid, and rival those in London. Lord Burghersh’s, with its six horses and tall footmen in fine liveries, is only distinguishable from the rest by the little child in a blue velvet hat and coat, looking out at the window. The Corso on Sundays, and on other high days and holidays, is filled with a double row of open carriages, like the ring in Hyde-Park, moving slowly in opposite directions, in which you see the flower of the Florentine nobility. I see no difference between them and the English, except that they are darker and graver. It was Carnival-time when we came, and the town presented something of the same scene that London does at Bartholomew-Fair. The streets were crowded with people, half of them masked. But what soon took off from the gaiety of the motley assemblage was, that you found that the masks were all the same. There was great observance of the season, and great good-will to be pleased, but a dearth of wit and invention. Not merely the uniformity of the masks grew tiresome, but the seeing an inflexible pasteboard countenance moving about upon a living body (and without any thing quaint or extravagant in the actions of the person to justify a resort to so grotesque a disguise) shocked by its unmeaning incongruity. May-day in London is a favourable version of the Carnival here. The finery of the chimney-sweepers is an agreeable and intelligible contrast to their usual squalidness. Their three days’ license has spirit, noise, and mirth in it; whereas the dull eccentricity and mechanical antics of the Carnival are drawled out till they are merged without any violent effort in the solemn farce of Lent. It had been a fine season this year, and it is said that the difference between a good season and a bad one to the trades-people is so great, that it pays the rent of their houses. No one is allowed to wear a mask, after Lent commences, and the priests never mask. There is no need that they should. There is no ringing of bells here as with us (triple bob-majors have not sent their cheering sound into the heart of Italy); but during the whole ten days or fortnight that the Carnival continues, there is a noise and jangling of bells, such as is made by the idle boys in a country town on our Shrove Tuesday. We could not tell exactly what to make of the striking of the clocks at first: at eight they struck two; at twelve six. We thought they were put back to prevent the note of time, or were thrown into confusion to accord with the license of the occasion. A day or two cleared up the mystery, and we found that the clocks here (at least those in our immediate neighbourhood) counted the hours by sixes, instead of going on to twelve—which method, when you are acquainted with it, saves time and patience in telling the hour. I have only heard of two masks that seemed to have any point or humour in them; and one of these was not a mask, but a person who went about with his face uncovered, but keeping it, in spite of every thing he saw or heard, in the same unmoved position as if it were a mask. The other was a person so oddly disguised, that you did not know what to make of him, whether he were man or woman, beast or bird, and who, pretending to be equally at a loss himself, went about asking every one, if they could tell him what he was? A Neapolitan nobleman who was formerly in England (Count Acetto), carried the liberty of masking too far. He went to the English Ambassador’s in the disguise of a monk, carrying a bundle of wood at his back, with a woman’s legs peeping out, and written on a large label, ‘Provision for the Convent.’ The clergy, it is said, interfered, and he has been exiled to Lucca. Lord Burghersh remonstrated loudly at this step, as a violation of the dignity and privileges of Ambassadors. The offence, whatever it was, was committed at his house, and the English Ambassador’s house is supposed to be in England—the absentees here were alarmed, for at this rate strangers might be sent out of the town at an hour’s notice for a jest. The Count called in person on the Grand Duke, who shook him kindly by the hand—the Countess Rinuccini demanded an interview with the Grand Duchess—but the clergy must be respected, and the Count has been sent away. There has been a good deal of talk and bustle about it—ask the opinion of a dry Scotchman, who judges of every thing by precedent, and he will tell you, ‘It is just like our Alien Bill.’ It is a rule here that a priest is never brought upon the stage. How do they contrive to act our Romeo and Juliet? Molière’s Tartuffe is not a priest, but merely a saint. When this play was forbidden to be acted a second time by the Archbishop of Paris, and the audience loudly demanded the reason of its being withdrawn, Molière came forward and said, ‘Monsieur l’Archevêque ne veut pas qu’il soit joué?’ This was a hundred and fifty years ago. With so much wit and sense in the world one wonders that there are any Tartuffes left in it; but for the last hundred and fifty years, it must be confessed, they have had but an uneasy life of it.
Lent is not kept here very strictly. The streets, however, have rather a ‘fishy fume’ in consequence of it; and, generally speaking, the use of garlick, tobacco, cloves and oil gives a medicated taint to the air. The number of pilgrims to Rome, at this season, is diminished from 80 or 90,000 a century ago, to a few hundreds at present. We passed two on the road, with their staff and scrip and motley attire. I did not look at them with any particle of respect. The impression was, that they were either knaves or fools. The farther they come on this errand, the more you have a right to suspect their motives, not that I by any means suppose these are always bad—but those who signalise their zeal by such long marches obtain not only absolution for the past, but extraordinary indulgence for the future, so that if a person meditate any baseness or mischief, a pilgrimage to Rome is his high road to it. The Popish religion is a convenient cloak for crime, an embroidered robe for virtue. It makes the essence of good and ill to depend on rewards and punishments, and places these in the hands of the priests, for the honour of God and the welfare of the church. Their path to Heaven is a kind of gallery directly over the path to Hell; or, rather, it is the same road, only that at the end of it you kneel down, lift up your hands and eyes, and say you have gone wrong, and you are admitted into the right-hand gate, instead of the left-hand one. Hell is said, in the strong language of controversial divinity, to be ‘paved with good intentions.’ Heaven, according to some fanatical creeds, is ‘paved with mock-professions.’ Devotees and proselytes are passed on like wretched paupers, with false certificates of merit, by hypocrites and bigots, who consider submission to their opinions and power as more than equivalent to a conformity to the dictates of reason or the will of God. All this is charged with being a great piece of cant and imposture: it is not more so than human nature itself. Popery is said to be a make-believe religion: man is a make-believe animal—he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part; he is ever at war with himself—his theory with his practice—what he would be (and therefore pretends to be) with what he is; and Popery is an admirable receipt to reconcile his higher and his lower nature in a beautiful equivoque or double-entendre of forms and mysteries,—the palpableness of sense with the dim abstractions of faith, the indulgence of passion with the atonement of confession and abject repentance when the fit is over, the debasement of the actual with the elevation of the ideal part of man’s nature, the Pagan with the Christian religion; to substitute lip-service, genuflections, adoration of images, counting of beads, repeating of Aves for useful works or pure intentions, and to get rid at once of all moral obligation, of all self-control and self-respect, by the proxy of maudlin superstition, by a slavish submission to priests and saints, by prostrating ourselves before them, and entreating them to take our sins and weaknesses upon them, and supply us with a saving grace (at the expence of a routine of empty forms and words) out of the abundance of their merits and imputed righteousness. This religion suits the pride and weakness of man’s intellect, the indolence of his will, the cowardliness of his fears, the vanity of his hopes, his disposition to reap the profits of a good thing and leave the trouble to others, the magnificence of his pretensions with the meanness of his performance, the pampering of his passions, the stifling of his remorse, the making sure of this world and the next, the saving of his soul and the comforting of his body. It is adapted equally to kings and people—to those who love power or dread it—who look up to others as Gods, or who would trample them under their feet as reptiles—to the devotees of show and sound, or the visionary and gloomy recluse—to the hypocrite and bigot—to saints or sinners—to fools or knaves—to men, women, and children. In short, its success is owing to this, that it is a mixture of bitter sweets—that it is a remedy that soothes the disease it affects to cure—that it is not an antidote, but a vent for the peccant humours, the follies and vices of mankind, with a salvo in favour of appearances, a reserve of loftier aspirations (whenever it is convenient to resort to them), and a formal recognition of certain general principles, as a courtesy of speech, or a compromise between the understanding and the passions! Omne tulit punctum. There is nothing to be said against it, but that it is contrary to reason and common sense; and even were they to prevail over it, some other absurdity would start up in its stead, not less mischievous but less amusing; for man cannot exist long without having scope given to his propensity to the marvellous and contradictory. Methodism with us is only a bastard kind of Popery, with which the rabble are intoxicated; and to which even the mistresses of Kings might resort (but for its vulgarity) to repair faded charms with divine graces, to exchange the sighs of passion for the tears of a no less luxurious repentance, and to exert one more act of power by making proselytes of their royal paramours!
The Popish calendar is but a transposition of the Pagan Mythology. The images, shrines, and pictures of the Virgin Mary, that we meet at the corner of every street or turning of a road, are not of modern date, but coeval with the old Greek and Roman superstitions. There were the same shrines and images formerly dedicated to Flora, or Ceres, or Pomona, and the flowers and the urn still remain. The oaths of the common people are to this day more Heathen than Catholic. They swear ‘By the countenance of Bacchus’—‘By the heart of Diana.’ A knavish innkeeper, if you complain of the badness of his wine, swears ‘Per Bacco e per Dio,’ ‘By Bacchus and by God, that it is good!’ I wonder when the change in the forms of image-worship took place in the old Roman States, and what effect it had. I used formerly to wonder how or when the people in the mountains of Cumberland and Westmoreland, and who live in solitudes to which the town of Keswick is the polite world, and its lake ‘the Leman-Lake,’ first passed from Popery to Protestantism, what difference it made in them at the time, or has done to the present day? The answer to this question would go a good way to shew how little the common people know of or care for any theory of religion, considered merely as such. Mr. Southey is on the spot, and might do something towards a solution of the difficulty!
Customs come round. I was surprised to find, at the Hotel of the Four Nations, where we stopped the two first days, that we could have a pudding for dinner (a thing that is not to be had in all France); and I concluded this was a luxury which the Italians had been compelled to adopt from the influx of the English, and the loudness of their demands for comfort. I understand it is more probable that this dish is indigenous rather than naturalized; and that we got it from them in the time of Queen Elizabeth, when our intercourse with Italy was more frequent than it was with France. We might have remained at the Four Nations; for eighteen francs a day, living in a very sumptuous manner; but we have removed to apartments fitted up in the English fashion, for ten piastres (two guineas) a month, and where the whole of our expenses for boiled and roast, with English cups and saucers and steamed potatoes, does not come to thirty shillings a week. We have every English comfort with clearer air and a finer country. It was exceedingly cold when we first came, and we felt it the more from impatience and disappointment. From the thinness of the air there was a feeling of nakedness about you; you seemed as if placed in an empty receiver. Not a particle of warmth or feeling was left in your whole body: it was just as if the spirit of cold had penetrated every part; one might be said to be vitrified. It is now milder (Feb. 23), and like April weather in England. There is a balmy lightness and vernal freshness in the air. Might I once more see the coming on of Spring as erst in the spring-time of my life, it would be here! I cannot speak to the subject of manners in this place, except as to outward appearances, which are the same as in a country town in England. Judging by the fashionable test on this subject, they must be very bad and desperate indeed; for none of that stream of prostitution flows down the streets, that in the British metropolis is supposed to purify the morality of private families, and to carry off every taint of grossness or licentiousness from the female heart. Cecisbeism still prevails here, less in the upper, more in the lower classes; and may serve as a subject for the English to vent their spleen and outrageous love of virtue upon.
Fesole, that makes so striking a point of view near Florence, was one of the twelve old Tuscan cities that existed before the time of the Romans, and afterwards in a state of hostility to them. It is supposed to have been originally founded by a Greek colony that came over with Cecrops, and others go back to the time of Japhet or to Hesiod’s theogony. Florence was not founded till long after. It is said to have occupied the three conically-shaped hills which stand about three miles from Florence. Here was fought the last great battle between Catiline and the Senate; and here the Romans besieged and starved to death an army of the Goths. It is a place of the highest antiquity and renown, but it does not bear the stamp of anything extraordinary upon its face. You stand upon a bleak, rocky hill, without suspecting it to have been the centre of a thronged population, the seat of battles and of mighty events in eldest times. So you pass through cities and stately palaces, and cannot be persuaded that, one day, no trace of them will be left. Italy is not favourable to the look of age or of length of time. The ravages of the climate are less fatal; the oldest places seem rather deserted than mouldering into ruin, and the youth and beauty of surrounding objects mixes itself up even with the traces of devastation and decay. The monuments of antiquity appear to enjoy a green old age in the midst of the smiling productions of modern civilization. The gloom of the seasons does not at any rate add its weight to the gloom and antiquity. It was in Italy, I believe, that Milton had the spirit and buoyancy of imagination to write his Latin sonnet on the Platonic idea of the archetype of the world, where he describes the shadowy cave in which ‘dwelt Eternity’ (otiosa eternitas), and ridicules the apprehension that Nature could ever grow old, or ‘shake her starry head with palsy.’ It has been well observed, that there is more of the germ of Paradise Lost in the author’s early Latin poems, than in his early English ones, which are in a strain rather playful and tender, than stately or sublime. It is said that several of Milton’s Poems, which he wrote at this period, are preserved in manuscript in the libraries in Florence; but it is probable that if so, they are no more than duplicates of those already known, which he gave to friends. His reputation here was high, and delightful to think of; and a volume was dedicated to him by Malatesta, a poet of the day, and a friend of Redi—‘To the ingenuous and learned young Englishman, John Milton.’ When one thinks of the poor figure which our countrymen often make abroad, and also of the supposed reserved habits and puritanical sourness of our great English Epic Poet, one is a little in pain for his reception among foreigners and surprised at his success, for which, perhaps, his other accomplishments (as his skill in music) and his personal advantages, may, in some measure, account. There is another consideration to be added, which is, that Milton did not labour under the disadvantage of addressing foreigners in their native tongue, but conversed with them on equal terms in Latin. That was surely the polite and enviable age of letters, when the learned spoke a common and well-known tongue, instead of petty, huckstering, Gothic dialects of different nations! Now, every one who is not a Frenchman, or who does not gabble French, is no better than a stammerer or a changeling out of his own country. I do not complain of this as a very great grievance; but it certainly prevents those far-famed meetings between learned men of different nations, which are recorded in history, as of Sir Thomas More with Erasmus, and of Milton with the philosophers and poets of Italy.
‘Sweet is the dialect of Arno’s vale: Though half consumed, I gladly turn to hear.’
So Dante makes one of his heroes exclaim. It is pleasant to hear or speak one’s native tongue when abroad; but possibly the language of that higher and adopted country, which was familiar to the scholar of former times, sounded even sweeter to the ear of friendship or of genius.
Chapter XVII
The first thing you do when you get to a town abroad is to go to the Post-office in expectation of letters, which you are sure not to receive exactly in proportion as you are anxious to have them. Friends at a distance have you at a disadvantage; and they let you know it, if they will let you know nothing else. There is in this a love of power or of contradiction, and at the same time a want of imagination. They cannot change places with you, or suppose how you can be so much at a loss about what is so obvious to them. It seems putting them to unnecessary trouble to transmit a self-evident truth (which it is upon the spot) a thousand miles (where it becomes a discovery). You have this comfort, however, under the delay of letters, that they have no bad news to send you, or you would hear of it in an instant.
When you are disappointed of your letters at the post-office at Florence, you turn round, and find yourself in the square of the Grand Duke, with the old Palace opposite to you, and a number of colossal statues, bleached in the open air, in front of it. They seem a species of huge stone-masonry. What is your surprise to learn, that they are the Hercules of Bandinello, and the David of Michael Angelo! Not far from these, is the Perseus of Benvenuto Cellini, which he makes such a fuss about in his Life.[41] It is of bronze. After a great deal of cabal, before he was employed on this work, and great hostility and disagreeable obstacles thrown in his way in the progress of it, he at length finished the mould, and prepared to cast the figure. He found that the copper which he had at first thrown in did not work kindly. After one or two visits to the furnace, he grew impatient, and seizing on all the lead, iron, and brass he could lay his hands on in the house, threw it pell-mell, and in a fit of desperation, into the melting mass, and retired to wait the result. After passing an hour in the greatest agitation, he returned; and inspecting the cast, to his extreme joy discovered it to be smooth and perfect, without a flaw in any part, except a dint in the heel. He then sat down to enjoy his triumph over his enemies, and to devour a cold chicken (which he had provided for his supper) with vast composure and relish. It is a pity that a work produced under such auspicious circumstances does not altogether answer the romantic expectations formed of it. There is something petty and forced about it; and it smells of the goldsmith’s and jeweller’s shop. I would rather see the large silver vase, richly embossed by him with groups of flowers and figures, which was ordered by the Pope and placed under his table for the Cardinals and other guests to throw their bones into, instead of throwing them on the floor for the dogs to pick up, as had hitherto been the custom—a fine proof of the mingled barbarism and refinement of those days.[42] Benvenuto was a character and a genius, and more of a character than of a genius; for, after all, the greatest geniuses are ‘men of no mark or likelihood.’ Their strongest impulses are not personal, but pass out of themselves into the universe; nor do they waste their energies upon their private whims and perverse peculiarities. In Bandinello one does not look for much; he was never much esteemed, and is made a butt of by Benvenuto Cellini. But what shall we say to a commonplace or barbarous piece of work by Michael Angelo? The David is as if a large mass of solid marble fell upon one’s head, to crush one’s faith in great names. It looks like an awkward overgrown actor at one of our minor theatres, without his clothes: the head is too big for the body, and it has a helpless expression of distress. The Bacchus in the Gallery, by the same artist, is no better. It is potbellied, lank, and with a sickly, mawkish aspect. Both these statues were, it is true, done when he was very young; and the latter, when finished, he buried underground, and had it dug up as an antique, and when it was pronounced by the virtuosi of the day to be superior to any thing in modern art, he produced the arm (which he had broken off), and claimed it as his own, to the confusion of his adversaries. Such is the story; and under the safeguard of this tradition, it has passed, criticism-proof. There are two pictures here attributed to this great artist; one in the Gallery, and another in the Palace Pitti, of The Fates, which are three meagre, dry, mean-looking old women. I shall not return to this subject till I get to the Vatican, and then I hope to tell a different story. Nothing more casts one down than to find an utter disproportion between the reality and one’s previous conceptions in a case of this kind, when one has been brooding all one’s life over an idea of greatness. If one could sneak off with one’s disappointment in one’s pocket, and say nothing about it, or whisper it to the reeds, or bury it in a hole, or throw it into the river (Arno), where no one would fish it up, it would not signify; but to be obliged to note it in one’s common-place book, and publish it to all the world, ‘tis villainous! It is well one can turn from disagreeable thoughts like these to a landscape of Titian’s (the Holy Family at the Pitti Palace). A green bank in the fore-ground presents a pastoral scene of sheep and cattle reposing; then you have the deep green of the middle distance, then the blue-topped hills, and the golden sky beyond, with the red branches of an autumn wood rising into it; and in the faces of the bending group you see the tints of the evening sky reflected, and the freshness of the landscape breathed on their features. The depth and harmony of colouring in natural objects, refined in passing through the painter’s mind, mellowed by the hand of time, has acquired the softness and shadowy brilliancy of a dream, and while you gaze at it, you seem to be entranced! But to take things somewhat more in order.—
One of the striking things in the Gallery at Florence (given to the City by one of the Medici Family) is the Collection of Antique Busts. The Statues of Gods are the poetry of the art of that period. The busts of men and women handed down to us are the history of the species. You see the busts of Vitellius (whose throat seems bursting with ‘the jowl’ and a dish of lampreys), Galba, Trajan, Augustus, Julia, Faustina, Messalina; and you ask, were there real beings like these existing two thousand years ago? It is an extension of the idea of humanity; and ‘even in death there is animation too.’ History is vague and shadowy, but sculpture gives life and body to it; the names and letters in time-worn books start up real people in marble, and you no longer doubt their identity with the present race. Nature produced forms then as perfect as she does now.—Forsyth and others have endeavoured to invalidate the authenticity of these busts, and to shew that few of them can be traced with certainty to the persons whose names they bear. That with me is not the question. The interesting point is not to know who they were, but that they were. There is no doubt that they are busts of people living two thousand years ago, and that is all that my moral demands. As to individual character, it would be as well sometimes to find it involved in obscurity; for some of the persons are better looking than for the truth of physiognomy they ought to be. Nero is as handsome a gentleman as his eulogists could wish him to be. The truth is, that what pleases me in these busts and others of the same kind that I have seen is, that they very much resemble English people of sense and education in the present day, only with more regular features. They are grave, thoughtful, unaffected. There is not a face among them that you could mistake for a French face. These fine old heads, in short, confirm one in the idea of general humanity: French faces stagger one’s faith in the species!
There are two long galleries enriched with busts and statues of the most interesting description, with a series of productions of the early Florentine school, the Flying Mercury of John of Bologna, &c.; and in a room near the centre (called the Tribune) stands the Venus of Medici, with some other statues and pictures not unworthy to do her homage. I do not know what to say of the Venus, nor is it necessary to say much where all the world have already formed an opinion for themselves; yet, perhaps, this opinion, which seems the most universal, is the least so, and the opinion of all the world means that of no one individual in it. The end of criticism, however, is rather to direct attention to objects of taste, than to dictate to it. Besides, one has seen the Venus so often and in so many shapes, that custom has blinded one equally to its merits or defects. Instead of giving an opinion, one is disposed to turn round and ask, ‘What do you think of it?’ It is like a passage in the ‘Elegant Extracts,’ which one has read and admired, till one does not know what to make of it, or how to affix any ideas to the words: beauty and sweetness end in an unmeaning commonplace! If I might, notwithstanding, hazard a hypercriticism, I should say, that it is a little too much like an exquisite marble doll. I should conjecture (for it is only conjecture where familiarity has neutralized the capacity of judging) that there is a want of sentiment, of character, a balance of pretensions as well as of attitude, a good deal of insipidity, and an over-gentility. There is no expression of mental refinement, nor much of voluptuous blandishment. There is great softness, sweetness, symmetry, and timid grace—a faultless tameness, a negative perfection. The Apollo Belvidere is positively bad, a theatrical coxcomb, and ill-made; I mean compared with the Theseus. The great objection to the Venus is, that the form has not the true feminine proportions; it is not sufficiently large in the lower limbs, but tapers too much to a point, so that it wants firmness and a sort of indolent repose (the proper attribute of woman), and seems as if the least thing would overset it. In a word, the Venus is a very beautiful toy, but not the Goddess of Love, or even of Beauty. It is not the statue Pygmalion fell in love with; nor did any man ever wish or fancy his mistress to be like it. There is something beyond it, both in imagination and in nature. Neither have we a firm faith in the identity of the Goddess; it is a nice point, whether any such form ever existed. Now let us say what we will of the ideal, it ought, when embodied to the senses, to bear the stamp of the most absolute reality, for it is only an image taken from nature, with every thing omitted that might contradict or disturb its uniformity. The Venus is not a poetical and abstract personification of certain qualities; but an individual model, that has been altered and tampered with. It would have had a better effect if executed in ivory, with gold sandals and bracelets, like that of Phidias (mentioned by Pliny), to define its pretensions as belonging to the class of ornamental art; for it neither carries the mind into the regions of ancient mythology, nor of ancient poetry, nor rises to an equality of style with modern poetry or painting. Raphael has figures of far greater grace, both mental and bodily. The Apollo of Medicis, which is in the same room, is a very delightful specimen of Grecian art; but it has the fault of being of that equivocal size (I believe called small-life) which looks like diminutive nature, not nature diminished.
Raphael’s Fornarina (which is also in this highly-embellished cabinet of art) faces the Venus, and is a downright, point-blank contrast to it. Assuredly no charge can be brought against it of mimmini-piminee affectation or shrinking delicacy. It is robust, full to bursting, coarse, luxurious, hardened, but wrought up to an infinite degree of exactness and beauty in the details. It is the perfection of vulgarity and refinement together. The Fornarina is a bouncing, buxom, sullen, saucy baker’s daughter—but painted, idolized, immortalized by Raphael! Nothing can be more homely and repulsive than the original; you see her bosom swelling like the dough rising in the oven; the tightness of her skin puts you in mind of Trim’s story of the sausage-maker’s wife—nothing can be much more enchanting than the picture—than the care and delight with which the artist has seized the lurking glances of the eye, curved the corners of the mouth, smoothed the forehead, dimpled the chin, rounded the neck, till by innumerable delicate touches, and the ‘labour of love,’ he has converted a coarse, rude mass into a miracle of art. Raphael, in the height of his devotion, and as it were to insinuate that nothing could be too fine for this idol of his fancy (as Rousseau prided himself in writing the letters of Julia on the finest paper with gilt edges) has painted the chain on the Fornarina’s neck with actual gold-leaf. Titian would never have thought of such a thing; he could not have been guilty of such a solecism in painting, as to introduce a solid substance without shadow. Highly as Raphael has laboured this portrait, it still shows his inferiority to Titian in the imitative part of painting. The colour on the cheeks of the Fornarina seems laid on the skin; in the girl by Titian at the Pitti Palace, it is seen through it. The one appears tanned by the sun; the other to have been out in the air, or is like a flower ‘just washed in the dew.’ Again, the surface of the flesh in Raphael is so smooth, that you are tempted to touch it: in Titian, it retires from the touch into a shadowy recess. There is here a duplicate (varied) of his Mistress at her Toilette (to be seen in the Louvre), dressed in a loose night-robe, and with the bosom nearly bare. It is very carefully finished, and is a rich study of colouring, expression, and natural grace. Of the Titian Venus (with her gouvernante and chest of clothes in the background) I cannot say much. It is very like the common print. The Endymion by Guercino has a divine character of pensive softness, and youthful, manly grace, and the impression made by the picture answers to that made by the fable—an excellent thing in history! It is one of the finest pictures in Florence. I should never have done if I were to go into the details. I can only mention a few of the principal. Near the Fornarina is the Young St. John in the Wilderness, by Raphael; it is very dark, very hard, and very fine, like an admirable carving in wood. He has here also two Holy Families, full of playful sweetness and mild repose. There are also two by Correggio of the same subject, and a fine and bold study of the Head of a Boy. There is a spirit of joy and laughing grace contained in this head, as the juice of wine is in the grape. Correggio had a prodigious raciness and gusto, when he did not fritter them away by false refinement and a sort of fastidious hypercriticism upon himself. His sketches, I suspect, are better than his finished works. One of the Holy Families here is the very acme of the affettuoso and Della Cruscan style of painting. The figure of the Madonna is like a studiously-involved period or turn upon words: the infant Christ on the ground is a diminutive appellation, a prettiness, a fairy-fancy. Certainly, it bears no proportion to the Mother, whose hands are bent back over it with admiration and delight, till grace becomes a cramp, and her eye-lids droop and quiver over the fluttering object of her ‘strange child-worship,’ almost as if they were moved by metallic tractors. The other Madonna is perfectly free from any taint of affectation. It is a plain rustic beauty, innocent, interesting, simple, without one contortion of body or of mind. It is sweetly painted. The Child is also a pure study after nature: the blood is tingling in his veins, and his face has an admirable expression of careless infantine impatience. The old Man at the side is a master-piece, with all this painter’s knowledge of foreshortening, chiaro-scuro, the management of drapery, &c. Herodias’s Daughter, by Luini, is an elaborate and successful imitation of Leonardo da Vinci. The Medusa’s Head of the latter is hardly, I think, so fine as Barry’s description of it. It has not quite the watery languor—the dim obscurity. The eyes of the female are too much like the eyes of the snakes, red, crusted, and edgy. I shall only notice one picture more in this collection—the Last Judgment, by Bronzino. It has vast merit in the drawing and expression, but its most remarkable quality is the amazing relief without any perceivable shadow, and the utmost clearness with the smallest possible variety of tint. It looks like a Mosaic painting. The specimens of the Dutch and other foreign schools here are upon a small scale, and of inferior value.
The Palace Pitti was begun by one of the Strozzi, who boasted that he would build a palace with a court-yard in it, in which another palace might dance. He had nearly ruined himself by the expense, when one of the Medici took it off his hands and completed it. It is at present the residence of the Grand Duke. The view within over the court-yard to the terrace and mount above is superb. Here is the Venus of Canova, an elegant sylph-like figure; but Canova was more to be admired for delicacy of finishing, than for expression or conception of general form. At the Gallery there is one room full of extraordinary pictures and statues: at the Palace Pitti there are six or seven covered with some of the finest portraits and history-pieces in the world, and the walls are dark with beauty, and breathe an air of the highest art from them. It is one of the richest and most original Collections I have seen. It is not so remarkable for variety of style or subject as for a noble opulence and aristocratic pride, having to boast names in the highest ranks of art, and many of their best works. The Palace Pitti formerly figured in the Catalogue of the Louvre, which it had contributed to enrich with many of its most gorgeous jewels, which have been brought back to their original situation, and which now shine here, though not with unreflected lustre, nor in solitary state. Among these, for instance, is Titian’s Hippolito di Medici (which the late Mr. Opie pronounced the finest portrait in the world), with the spirit and breadth of history, and with the richness, finish, and glossiness of an enamel picture. I remember the first time I ever saw it, it stood on an easel which I had to pass, with the back to me, and as I turned and saw it with the boar-spear in its hand, and its keen glance bent upon me, it seemed ‘a thing of life,’ with supernatural force and grandeur. The famous music-piece by Giorgioni was at one time in the Louvre, and is not a whit inferior to Titian. The head turned round of the man playing on the harpsichord, for air, expression, and a true gusto of colouring, may challenge competition all the world through. There goes a tradition that these are the portraits of Luther and Calvin. Giorgioni died at the age of thirty-four, heart-broken, it is said, because one of his scholars had robbed him of his mistress—possibly the very beauty whose picture is introduced here. Leo X., by Raphael, that fine, stern, globular head, on which ‘deliberation sits and public care,’ is in the same room with the Cardinal Bentivoglio, one of Vandyke’s happiest and most spiritual heads—a fine group of portraits by Rubens, of himself, his brother, Grotius and Justus Lipsius, all in one frame—an admirable Holy Family, in this master’s very best manner, by Julio Romano—and the Madonna della Seggia of Raphael—all of these were formerly in the Louvre. The last is painted on wood, and worn, so as to have a crayon look. But for the grouping, the unconscious look of intelligence in the children, and the rounding and fleshiness of the forms of their limbs, this is one of the artist’s most unrivalled works. There are also several by Andrea del Sarto, conceived and finished with the highest taste and truth of feeling; a Nymph and Satyr by Giorgioni, of great gusto; Hercules and Antæus, by Schiavoni (an admirable study of bold drawing and poetical colouring), an unfinished sketch by Guido, several by Cigoli and Fra. Bartolomeo; a girl in a flowered dress, by Titian (of which Mr. Northcote possesses a beautiful copy by Sir Joshua); another portrait of a Man in front view and a Holy Family, by the same; and one or two fine pieces by Rubens and Rembrandt. There is a Parmegiano here, in which is to be seen the origin of Mr. Fuseli’s style, a child in its mother’s lap, with its head rolling away from its body, the mother’s face looking down upon it with green and red cheeks tapering to a point, and a thigh of an angel, which you cannot well piece to an urn which he carries in his hand, and which seems like a huge scale of the ‘shard-borne beetle.’—The grotesque and discontinuous are, in fact, carried to their height. Here is also the Conspiracy of Catiline, by Salvator Rosa, which looks more like a Cato-street Conspiracy than any thing else, or a bargain struck in a blacksmith’s shop; and a Battle-piece by the same artist, with the round haunches and flowing tail of a white horse repeated, and some fierce faces, hid by the smoke and their helmets, of which you can make neither head nor tail. Salvator was a great landscape-painter; but both he and Lady Morgan have been guilty of a great piece of egotism in supposing that he was any thing more. These are the chief failures, but in general out of heaps of pictures there is scarce one that is not of the highest interest both in itself, and from collateral circumstances. Those who come in search of high Italian art will here find it in perfection; and if they do not feel this, they may turn back at once. The pictures in the Pitti Palace are finely preserved, and have that deep, mellow tone of age upon them which is to the eyes of a connoisseur in painting as the rust of medals or the crust on wine is to connoisseurs and judges of a different stamp.
Chapter XVIII
The road between Florence and Rome by Sienna is not very interesting, though it presents a number of reflections to those who are well acquainted with the changes that have taken place in the history and agriculture of these districts. Shortly after you leave Florence, the way becomes dreary and barren or unhealthy. Towards the close of the first day’s journey, however, we had a splendid view of the country we were to travel, which lay stretched out beneath our feet to an immense distance, as we descended into the little town of Pozzo Borgo. Deep valleys sloped on each side of us, from which the smoke of cottages occasionally curled: the branches of an overhanging birch-tree or a neighbouring ruin gave relief to the grey, misty landscape, which was streaked by dark pine-forests, and speckled by the passing clouds; and in the extreme distance rose a range of hills glittering in the evening sun, and scarcely distinguishable from the ridge of clouds that hovered near them. We did not reach these hills (on the top of one of which stands the fort of Radicofani) till the end of two days’ journey, making a distance of between fifty and sixty miles, so that their miniature size and fairy splendour, as they crowned the far-off horizon, may be easily guessed. We did not find the accommodation on the road quite so bad as we had expected. The chief want is of milk, which is to be had only in the morning; but we remedied this defect by a taking a bottle of it with us. The weather was cold enough (in the middle of March) to freeze it. The economy of life is here reduced to a very great simplicity, absolute necessaries from day to day and from hand to mouth; and nothing is allowed for the chapter of accidents, or the irregular intrusion of strangers. The mechanism of English inns is accounted for by the certainty of the arrival of customers, with full pockets and empty stomachs. There every road is a thoroughfare; here a traveller is a curiosity, and we did not meet ten carriages on our journey, a distance of a hundred and ninety-three miles, and which it took us six days to accomplish. I may add that we paid only seven louis for our two places in the Voiture (which, besides, we had entirely to ourselves) our expences on the road included. This is cheap enough.
Sienna is a fine old town, but more like a receptacle of the dead than the residence of the living. ‘IT WAS,’ might be written over the entrance to this, as to most of the towns in Italy. The magnificence of the buildings corresponds but ill with the squalidness of the inhabitants; there seems no reason for crowding the streets so close together when there are so few people in them. There is at present no enemy without to huddle them together within the walls, whatever might have been the case in former times: for miles you do not meet a human being, or discern the traces of a human dwelling. The view through the noble arch of the gate as you leave Sienna is at once exquisitely romantic and picturesque: otherwise, the country presents a most deplorable aspect for a length of way. Nature seems to have here taken it upon her to play the part of a cinder-wench, and to have thrown up her incessant heaps of clay and ashes, without either dignity or grace. At a distance to the right and left, you see the stately remains of the ancient Etruscan cities, cresting the heights and built for defence; and here and there, perched on the top of a cliff, the ruinous haunt of some bandit chief (the scourge of later days), that might be compared in imagination to some dragon, old and blind, still watching for its long-lost prey, and sharing the desolation it has made. There are two of these near the wretched inn of La Scala, where we stopped the third morning, rising in lonely horror from the very point of two hills, facing each other and only divided by a brook, that baffle description, and require the artist’s boldest pencil. Aided by the surrounding gloom, and shrouded by the driving mist (as they were when we passed), they throw the mind back into a trance of former times, and the cry of midnight revelry, of midnight murder is heard from the crumbling walls. The romantic bridge and hamlet under them begins the ascent of Radicofani. The extensive ruin at the top meets your view and disappears repeatedly during the long, winding, toilsome ascent. Over a tremendous valley to the left, we saw the distant hills of Perugia, covered with snow and blackened with clouds, and a heavy sleet was falling around us. We started, on being told that the post-house stood directly on the other side of the fort (at a height of 2400 feet above the level of the sea), and that we were to pass the night there. It was like being lodged in a cloud: it seemed the very rocking-cradle of storms and tempests. As we wound round the road at the foot of it, we were relieved from our apprehensions. It was a fortress built by stubborn violence for itself, that might be said to scowl defiance on the world below, and to promise security and shelter to those within its reach. Huge heaps of round stones, gnarled like iron, and that looked as if they would break the feet that trusted themselves among them, were rolled into the space between the heights and the road-side. The middle or principal turret, which rose between the other two, was thrown into momentary perspective by the mist; a fragment of an outer wall stood beneath, half covered with ivy; close to it was an old chapel-spire built of red brick, and a small hamlet crouched beneath the ramparts. It reminded me, by its preternatural strength and sullen aspect, of the castle of Giant Despair in The Pilgrim’s Progress. The dark and stern spirit of former times might be conceived to have entrenched itself here as in its last hold; to have looked out and laughed at precipices and storms, and the puny assaults of hostile bands, and resting on its red right arm, to have wasted away through inaction and disuse in its unapproachable solitude and barbarous desolation. Never did I see any thing so rugged and so stately, apparently so formidable in a former period, so forlorn in this. It was a majestic shadow of the mighty past, suspended in another region, belonging to another age. I might take leave of it in the words of old Burnet, whose Latin glows among these cold hills, Vale augusta sedes, digna rege; vale augusta rupes, semper mihi memoranda!—We drove into the inn-yard, which resembled a barrack (so do most of the inns on the road), with its bed-rooms like hospital-wards, and its large apartments for assemblages of armed men, now empty, gloomy, and unfurnished; but where we found a hospitable welcome, and by the aid of a double fee to the waiters every thing very comfortable. The first object was to procure milk for our tea (of which last article we had brought some very good from the shop of Signor Pippini, at Florence[43]) and the next thing was to lay in a stock for the remaining half of our journey. We were not sorry to pass a night at the height of 2400 feet above the level of the sea, and immediately under this famous fortress. The winds ‘howled through the vacant guard-rooms and deserted lobbies’ of our hostelry, and the snow descended in a heavy fall, and covered the valleys; but Radicofani looked the same, as we saw it through the coach-windows the next morning, old, grey, deserted, gloomy, as if it had survived ‘a thousand storms, a thousand winters’—the peasant still crawled along its trenches, the traveller stopped to gaze at its battlements—but neither spear nor battle-axe would glitter there again, nor banner be spread, nor the clash of arms be heard in the round of ever-rolling years—it looked back to other times as we looked back upon it, and stood towering in its decay, and nodding to an eternal repose! The road in this, as in other parts of Italy, is evidently calculated, and was originally constructed, for the march of an army. Instead of creeping along the valleys, it passes along the ridges of hills to prevent surprise, or watch the movements of an enemy, and thus generally commands an extensive view of the country, such as it is. It was long before winding slowly into the valley, we lost sight of our last night’s station.
Aquapendente is situated on the brow of a hill, over a running stream, as its name indicates, and the ascent to it is up the side of a steep rugged ravine, with overhanging rocks and shrubs. The mixture of wildness and luxuriance answered to my idea of Italian scenery, but I had seen little of it hitherto. The town is old, dirty, and disagreeable; and we were driven to an inn in one of the bye-streets, where there was but one sitting-room, which was occupied by an English family, who were going to leave it immediately, but who, I suppose, on hearing that some one else was waiting for it, claimed the right of keeping it as long as they pleased. The assertion of an abstract right is the idea uppermost in the minds of all English people. Unfortunately, when its attainment is worth any thing, their spirit of contradiction makes them ready to relinquish it; or when it costs them any thing, their spirit of self-interest deters them from the pursuit! After waiting some time, we at last breakfasted in a sort of kitchen or outhouse upstairs, where we had very excellent but homely fare, and where we were amused with the furniture—a dove-house, a kid, half-skinned, hanging on the walls; a loose heap of macaroni and vegetables in one corner, plenty of smoke, a Madonna carved and painted, and a map of Constantinople. The pigeons on the floor were busy with their murmuring plaints, and often fluttered their wings as if to fly. So, thought I, the nations of the earth clap their wings, and strive in vain to be free! The landlady was a woman about forty, diminutive and sickly, but with one of those pale, mild, penetrating faces which one seldom sees out of Italy. She was the mother of two buxom daughters, as coarse and hard as any thing of the kind one might meet with in Herefordshire or Gloucestershire! The road from Aquapendente is of a deep heavy soil, over which the horses with difficulty dragged the carriage, The view on one side was bounded by two fine conical hills clothed to the very top with thick woods of beech and fir; and our route lay for miles over an undulating ground covered with the wild broom (growing to the size of a large shrub), among which herds of slate-coloured oxen were seen browzing luxuriously. The broom floated above them, their covering and their food, with its flexible silken branches of light green, and presented an eastern scene, extensive, soft and wild. We passed, I think, but one habitation between Aquapendente and San Lorenzo, and met but one human being, which was a Gen d’Armes! I asked our Vetturino if this dreary aspect of the country was the effect of nature or of art. He pulled a handful of earth from the hedge-side, and shewed a rich black loam, capable of every improvement. I asked in whose dominions we were, and received for answer, ‘In the Pope’s.’ San Lorenzo is a town built on the summit of a hill, in consequence of the ravages of the malaria in the old town, situated in the valley below. It looks like a large alms-house, or else like a town that has run away from the plague and itself, and stops suddenly on the brow of a hill to see if the Devil is following it. The ruins below are the most ghastly I ever saw. The scattered fragments of walls and houses are crumbling away like rotten bones, and there are holes in the walls and subterraneous passages, in which disease, like an ugly witch, seems to lurk and to forbid your entrance. Further on, and winding round the edge of the lake, you come to Bolsena. The unwholesome nature of the air from the water may be judged of from the colour of the tops of the houses, the moss on which is as yellow as the jaundice, and the grass and corn-fields on its borders are of a tawny green. The road between this and Monte-Fiascone, which you see on an eminence before you, lies through a range of gloomy defiles, and is deformed by the blackened corses of huge oak-trees, that strew the road-side, the unsightly relics of fine old woods that were cut down and half-burnt a few years ago as the haunts of bands of robbers. They plant morals in this country by rooting up trees! While the country is worth seeing, it is not safe to travel; but picturesque beauty must, of course, give place to the police. I thought, when I first saw these cadaverous trunks lying by the side of the lake, that they were the useless remains of cargoes of timber that we had purchased of the Holy See to fight its battles, and maintain the cause of social order in every part of the world! Let no English traveller stop at Monte-Fiascone (I mean at the inn outside the town), unless he would be starved and smoke-dried, but pass on to Viterbo, which is a handsome town, with the best inn on the road. You pass one night more on the road in this mode of travelling (which resembles walking a minuet, rather than striking up a country dance) at Ronciglione; and the next day from Baccano, you see rising up, in a flat, hazy plain, the dome of St. Peter’s. You proceed for some miles along a gradual descent without any object of much interest, pass the Tiber and the gate Del Popolo, and you are in Rome. When there, go any where but to Franks’s Hotel, and get a lodging, if possible, on the Via Gregoriana, which overlooks the town, and where you can feast the eye and indulge in sentiment, without being poisoned by bad air. The house of Salvator Rosa is at present let out in lodgings. I have now lived twice in houses occupied by celebrated men, once in a house that had belonged to Milton, and now in this, and find to my mortification that imagination, is entirely a thing imaginary, and has nothing to do with matter of fact, history, or the senses. To see an object of thought or fancy is just as impossible as to feel a sound or hear a smell.
Chapter XIX
‘As London is to the meanest country town, so is Rome to every other city in the world.’
So said an old friend of mine, and I believed him till I saw it. This is not the Rome I expected to see. No one from being in it would know he was in the place that had been twice mistress of the world. I do not understand how Nicolas Poussin could tell, taking up a handful of earth, that it was ‘a part of the ETERNAL CITY.’ In Oxford an air of learning breathes from the very walls: halls and colleges meet your eye in every direction; you cannot for a moment forget where you are. In London there is a look of wealth and populousness which is to be found nowhere else. In Rome you are for the most part lost in a mass of tawdry, fulsome common-places. It is not the contrast of pig-styes and palaces that I complain of, the distinction between the old and new; what I object to is the want of any such striking contrast, but an almost uninterrupted succession of narrow, vulgar-looking streets, where the smell of garlick prevails over the odour of antiquity, with the dingy, melancholy flat fronts of modern-built houses, that seem in search of an owner. A dunghill, an outhouse, the weeds growing under an imperial arch offend me not; but what has a green-grocer’s stall, a stupid English china warehouse, a putrid trattoria, a barber’s sign, an old clothes or old picture shop or a Gothic palace, with two or three lacqueys in modern liveries lounging at the gate, to do with ancient Rome? No! this is not the wall that Romulus leaped over: this is not the Capitol where Julius Cæsar fell: instead of standing on seven hills, it is situated in a low valley: the golden Tiber is a muddy stream: St. Peter’s is not equal to St. Paul’s: the Vatican falls short of the Louvre, as it was in my time; but I thought that here were works immoveable, immortal, inimitable on earth, and lifting the soul half way to heaven. I find them not, or only what I had seen before in different ways: the Stanzas of Raphael are faded, or no better than the prints; and the mind of Michael Angelo’s figures, of which no traces are to be found in the copies, is equally absent from the walls of the Sistine Chapel. Rome is great only in ruins: the Coliseum, the Pantheon, the Arch of Constantine fully answered my expectations; and an air breathes round her stately avenues, serene, blissful, like the mingled breath of spring and winter, betwixt life and death, betwixt hope and despair. The country about Rome is cheerless and barren. There is little verdure, nor are any trees planted, on account of their bad effects on the air. Happy climate! in which shade and sunshine are alike fatal. The Jews (I may add while I think of it) are shut up here in a quarter by themselves. I see no reason for it. It is a distinction not worth the making. There was a talk (it being Anno Santo) of shutting them up for the whole of the present year. A soldier stands at the gate, to tell you that this is the Jews’ quarter, and to take any thing you choose to give him for this piece of Christian information. A Catholic church stands outside their prison, with a Crucifixion painted on it as a frontispiece, where they are obliged to hear a sermon in behalf of the truth of the Christian religion every Good Friday. On the same day they used to make them run races in the Corso, for the amusement of the rabble (high and low)—now they are compelled to provide horses for the same purpose. Owing to the politeness of the age, they no longer burn them as of yore, and that is something. Religious zeal, like all other things, grows old and feeble. They treat the Jews in this manner at Rome (as a local courtesy to St. Peter), and yet they compliment us on our increasing liberality to the Irish Catholics. The Protestant chapel here stands outside the walls, while there is a British monument to the memory of the Stuarts, inside of St. Peter’s; the tombs in the English burying-ground were destroyed and defaced not long ago; yet this did not prevent the Prince Regent from exchanging portraits with the Pope and his Ministers!—‘Oh! liberalism—lovely liberalism!’ as Mr. Blackwood would say.
From the window of the house where I lodge, I have a view of the whole city at once: nay, I can see St. Peter’s as I lie in bed of a morning. The town is an immense mass of solid stone-buildings, streets, palaces, and churches; but it has not the beauty of the environs of Florence, nor the splendid background of Turin, nor does it present any highly picturesque or commanding points of view like Edinburgh. The pleasantest walks I know are round the Via Sistina, and along the Via di Quattro-Fontane—they overlook Rome from the North-East on to the churches of Santa Maria Maggiore, and of St. John Lateran, towards the gate leading to Naples. As we loiter on, our attention was caught by an open greensward to the left, with foot-paths, and a ruined wall and gardens on each side. A carriage stood in the road just by, and a gentleman and lady, with a little child, had got out of it to walk. A soldier and a girl were seen talking together further on, and a herd of cattle were feeding at their leisure on the yielding turf. The day was close and dry—not a breath stirred. All was calm and silent. It had been cold when we set out, but here the air was soft—of an Elysian temperature, as if the winds did not dare to visit the sanctuaries of the dead too roughly. The daisy sprung beneath our feet—the fruit-trees blossomed within the nodding arches. On one side were seen the hills of Albano, on the other the Claudian gate; and close by was Nero’s Golden House, where there were seventy thousand statues and pillars, of marble and of silver, and where senates kneeled, and myriads shouted in honour of a frail mortal, as of a God. Come here, oh man! and worship thine own spirit, that can hoard up, as in a shrine, the treasures of two thousand years, and can create out of the memory of fallen splendours and departed grandeur a solitude deeper than that of desert wildernesses, and pour from the out-goings of thine own thoughts a thunder louder than that of maddening multitudes! No place was ever so still as this; for none was ever the scene of such pomp and triumph! Not far from this are the Baths of Titus; the grass and the poppy (the flower of oblivion) grow over them, and in the vaults below they shew you (by the help of a torch) paintings on the ceiling eighteen hundred years old, birds, and animals, a figure of a slave, a nymph and a huntsman, fresh and elegantly foreshortened, and also the place where the Laocoon was discovered. A few paces off is the Coliseum, or Amphitheatre of Titus, the noblest ruin in Rome. It is circular, built of red stone and brick, with arched windows, and the gillyflower and fennel growing on its walls to the very top: one side is nearly perfect. As you pass under it, it seems to raise itself above you, and mingle with the sky in its majestic simplicity, as if earth were a thing too gross for it; it stands almost unconscious of decay, and may still stand for ages—though Mr. Hobhouse has written Annotations upon it! There is a hypocritical inscription on it, to say that it has been kept in repair by the Popes, in order to preserve the memory of the martyrs that suffered here in cruel combats with wild beasts. As I have alluded to this subject, I will add that I think the finest stanza in Lord Byron is that where he describes the Dying Gladiator, who falls and does not hear the shout of barbarous triumph echoing from these very walls:—
‘He hears it not; his thoughts are far away, Where his rude hut beside the Danube lay; There are his young barbarians, all at play, They and their Dacian mother; he their sire Is doom’d to make a Roman holiday. When will ye rise, ye Goths? awake and glut your ire!’ CHILDE HAROLD.
The temple of Vesta is on the Tiber. It is not unlike an hour-glass—or a toad-stool; it is small, but exceedingly beautiful, and has a look of great antiquity. The Pantheon is also as fine as possible. It has the most perfect unity of effect. It was hardly a proper receptacle for the Gods of the Heathens, for it has a simplicity and grandeur like the vaulted cope of Heaven. Compared with these admired remains of former times I must say that the more modern churches and palaces in Rome are poor, flashy, upstart looking things. Even the dome of St. Peter’s is for the most part hid by the front, and the Vatican has no business by its side. The sculptures there are also indifferent, and the mosaics, except two—the Transfiguration and St. Jerome, ill chosen. I was lucky enough to see the Pope here on Easter Sunday. He seems a harmless, infirm, fretful old man. I confess I should feel little ambition to be at the head of a procession, at which the ignorant stare, the better informed smile. I was also lucky enough to see St. Peter’s illuminated to the very top (a project of Michael Angelo’s) in the evening. It was finest at first, as the kindled lights blended with the fading twilight. It seemed doubtful whether it were an artificial illumination, the work of carpenters and torch-bearers, or the reflection of an invisible sun. One half of the cross shone with the richest gold, and rows of lamps gave light as from a sky. At length a shower of fairy lights burst out at a signal in all directions, and covered the whole building. It looked better at a distance than when we went nearer it. It continued blazing all night. What an effect it must have upon the country round! Now and then a life or so is lost in lighting up the huge fabric, but what is this to the glory of the church and the salvation of souls, to which it no doubt tends? I can easily conceive some of the wild groups that I saw in the streets the following day to have been led by delight and wonder from their mountain-haunts, or even from the bandits’ cave, to worship at this new starry glory, rising from the earth. The whole of the immense space before St. Peter’s was in the afternoon crowded with people to see the Pope give his benediction. The rich dresses of the country people, the strong features and orderly behaviour of all, gave this assemblage a decided superiority over any thing of the kind I had seen in England. I did not hear the Miserere which is chaunted by the Priests, and sung by a single voice (I understand like an angel’s) in a dim religious light in the Sistine Chapel; nor did I see the exhibition of the relics, at which I was told all the beauty of Rome was present. It is something even to miss such things. After all, St. Peter’s does not seem to me the chief boast or most imposing display of the Catholic religion. Old Melrose Abbey, battered to pieces and in ruins, as it is, impresses me much more than the collective pride and pomp of Michael Angelo’s great work. Popery is here at home, and may strut and swell and deck itself out as it pleases, on the spot and for the occasion. It is the pageant of an hour. But to stretch out its arm fifteen hundred miles, to create a voice in the wilderness, to have left its monuments standing by the Teviot-side, or to send the midnight hymn through the shades of Vallombrosa, or to make it echo among Alpine solitudes, that is faith, and that is power. The rest is a puppet-shew! I am no admirer of Pontificals, but I am a slave to the picturesque. The Priests talking together in St. Peter’s, or the common people kneeling at the altars, make groups that shame all art. The inhabitants of the city have something French about them—something of the cook’s and the milliner’s shop—something pert, gross, and cunning; but the Roman peasants redeem the credit of their golden sky. The young women that come here from Gensano and Albano, and that are known by their scarlet boddices and white head-dresses and handsome good-humoured faces, are the finest specimens I have ever seen of human nature. They are like creatures that have breathed the air of Heaven, till the sun has ripened them into perfect beauty, health, and goodness. They are universally admired in Rome. The English women that you see, though pretty, are pieces of dough to them. Little troops and whole families, men, women, and children, from the Campagna and neighbouring districts of Rome, throng the streets during Easter and Lent, who come to visit the shrine of some favourite Saint, repeating their Aves aloud, and telling their beads with all the earnestness imaginable. Popery is no farce to them. They surely think St. Peter’s is the way to Heaven. You even see priests counting their beads, and looking grave. If they can contrive to get possession of this world for themselves, and give the laity the reversion of the next, were it only in imagination, something is to be said for the exchange. I only hate half-way houses in religion or politics, that take from us all the benefits of ignorance and superstition, and give us none of the advantages of liberty or philosophy in return. Thus I hate Princes who usurp the thrones of others, and would almost give them back, sooner than allow the rights of the people. Once more, how does that monument to the Stuarts happen to be stuck up in the side-aisle of St. Peter’s? I would ask the person who placed it there, how many Georges there have been since James III.? His ancestor makes but an ambiguous figure beside the posthumous group—
‘So sit two Kings of Brentford on one throne!’
The only thing unpleasant in the motley assemblage of persons at Rome, is the number of pilgrims with their greasy oil-skin cloaks. They are a dirty, disgusting set, with a look of sturdy hypocrisy about them. The Pope (pro formâ) washes their feet; the Nuns, when they come, have even a less delicate office to perform. Religion, in the depth of its humility, ought not to forget decorum. But I am a traveller, and not a reformer.
The picture-galleries in Rome disappointed me quite. I was told there were a dozen at least, equal to the Louvre; there is not one. I shall not dwell long upon them, for they gave me little pleasure. At the Ruspigliosi Palace (near the Monte Cavallo, where are the famous Colossal groups, said to be by Phidias and Praxiteles, of one of which we have a cast in Hyde Park) are the Aurora and the Andromeda, by Guido. The first is a most splendid composition (like the Daughter of the Dawn) but painted in fresco; and the artist has, in my mind, failed through want of practice in the grace and colouring of most of the figures. They are a clumsy, gloomy-looking set, and not like Guido’s females. The Andromeda has all the charm and sweetness of his pencil, in its pearly tones, its graceful timid action, and its lovely expression of gentleness and terror. The face, every part of the figure, has a beauty and softness not to be described. This one figure is worth all the other group, and the Apollo, the horses and the azure sea to boot. People talk of the insipidity of Guido. Oh! let me drink long, repeated, relishing draughts of such insipidity! If delicacy, beauty, and grace are insipidity, I too profess myself an idolizer of insipidity: I will venture one assertion, which is, that no other painter has expressed the female character so well, so truly, so entirely in its fragile, lovely essence, neither Raphael, nor Titian, nor Correggio; and, after these, it is needless to mention any more. Raphael’s women are Saints; Titian’s are courtesans; Correggio’s an affected mixture of both; Guido’s are the true heroines of romance, the brides of the fancy, such as ‘youthful poets dream of when they love,’ or as a Clarissa, a Julia de Roubigne, or a Miss Milner would turn out to be! They are not only angels, but young ladies into the bargain, which is more than can be said for any of the others, and yet it is something to say. Vandyke sometimes gave this effect in portrait, but his historical figures are fanciful and sprawling. Under the Andromeda is a portrait by Nicholas Poussin of himself (a duplicate of that in the Louvre), and an infant Cupid or Bacchus, by the same artist, finely coloured, and executed in the manner of Titian. There is in another room an unmeaning picture, by Annibal Caracci, of Samson pulling down the temple of the Philistines, and also a fine dead Christ by him; add to these a Diana and Endymion by Guercino, in which the real sentiment of the story is thrown into the landscape and figures. The Ruspigliosi Pavilion, containing these and some inferior pictures, is situated near the remains of Constantine’s Bath in a small raised garden or terrace, in which the early violets and hyacinths blossom amidst broken cisterns and defaced statues. It is a pretty picture; art decays, but nature still survives through all changes. At the Doria Palace, there is nothing remarkable but the two Claudes, and these are much injured in colour. The trees are black, and the water looks like lead. There are several Garofolos, which are held in esteem here (not unjustly) and one fine head by Titian. The Velasquez (Innocent X.), so much esteemed by Sir Joshua, is a spirited sketch. The Borghese Palace has three fine pictures, and only three—the Diana and Actæon of Domenichino; the Taking down from the Cross, by Raphael; and Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love. This last picture has a peculiar and inexpressible charm about it. It is something between portrait and allegory, a mixture of history and landscape, simple and yet quaint, fantastical yet without meaning to be so, but as if a sudden thought had struck the painter, and he could not help attempting to execute it out of curiosity, and finishing it from the delight it gave him. It is full of sweetness and solemnity. The Diana of Domenichino is just the reverse of it. Every thing here is arranged methodically, and is the effect of study and forethought. Domenichino was a painter of sense, feeling, and taste; but his pencil was meagre, and his imagination dispirited and impoverished. In Titian, the execution surpassed the design, and the force of his hand and eye, as he went on, enriched the most indifferent outline: in Domenichino, the filling up fell short of the conception and of his own wishes. He was a man of great modesty and merit; and when others expressed an admiration of his talents, they were obliged to reckon up a number of his chef-d’œuvres to convince him that they were in earnest. He could hardly believe that any one else thought much of his works, when he thought so little of them himself. Raphael’s Taking down from the Cross is in his early manner, and the outlines of the limbs are like the edges of plates of tin; but it has what was inseparable from his productions, first and last, pregnant expression and careful drawing. I ought to mention that there is, by the same master-hand, a splendid portrait of Cæsar Borgia, which is an addition to my list. The complexion is a strange mixture of orange and purple. The hair of his sister, Lucretia Borgia (the friend and mistress of Cardinal Bembo) is still preserved in Italy, and a lock of it was in the possession of Lord Byron. I lately saw it in company with that of Milton and of Bonaparte, looking calm, golden, beautiful, a smiling trophy from the grave! The number and progressive improvement of Raphael’s works in Italy is striking. It might teach our holiday artists that to do well is to do much. Excellence springs up behind us, not before us; and is the result of what we have done, not of what we intend to do. Many artists (especially those abroad, who are distracted with a variety of styles and models) never advance beyond the contemplation of some great work, and think to lay in an unexampled store of accomplishments, before they commence any undertaking. That is where they ought to end; to begin with it is too much. It is as if the foundation-stone should form the cupola of St. Peter’s. Great works are the result of much labour and of many failures, and not of pompous pretensions and fastidious delicacy.
The Corsini pictures are another large and very indifferent collection. All I can recollect worth mentioning are, a very sweet and silvery-toned Herodias, by Guido; a fine landscape, by Gaspar Poussin; an excellent sketch from Ariosto of the Giant Orgagna; and the Plague of Milan by a modern artist, a work of great invention and judgment, and in which the details of the subject are so managed as to affect, and not to shock. The Campidoglio collection is better. There is a large and admirable Guercino, an airy and richly-coloured Guido, some capital little Garofolos, a beautiful copy of a Repose of Titian’s by Pietro da Cortona, several Giorgiones, and a number of antique busts of the most interesting description. Here is the bronze She-Wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus, and the Geese that cackled in the Capitol. I find nothing so delightful as these old Roman heads of Senators, Warriors, Philosophers. They have all the freshness of truth and nature. They shew something substantial in mortality. They are the only things that do not crush and overturn our sense of personal identity; and are a fine relief to the mouldering relics of antiquity, and to the momentary littleness of modern things! The little Farnese contains the Galatea and the Cupid and Psyche. If any thing could have raised my idea of Raphael higher, it would have been some of these frescoes. I would mention the group of the Graces in particular; they are true Goddesses. The fine flowing outline of the limbs, the variety of attitudes, the unconscious grace, the charming unaffected glow of the expression, are inimitable. Raphael never perhaps escaped so completely from the trammels of his first manner, as in this noble series of designs. The Galatea has been injured in colour by the stoves which the Germans, who were quartered there, lighted in the apartment. In the same room is the famous chalk head, said to have been sketched upon the wall by Michael Angelo. The story is probably a fabrication; the head is as coarse and mechanical as any thing can be. Raphael’s Loggia in the corridors of the Vatican (the subjects of what is called his Bible) appear to me divine in form, relief, conception—above all, the figure of Eve at the forbidden tree; his Stanzas there appear to me divine, more particularly the Heliodorus, the School of Athens, and the Miracle of Bolseno, with all the truth and force of character of Titian’s portraits (I see nothing, however, of his colouring) and his own purity, sweetness, and lofty invention, added to them. His oil pictures there are divine. The Transfiguration is a wonderful collection of fine heads and figures: their fault is, that they are too detached and bare, but it is not true that it embraces two distinct points of time. The event below is going on in the Gospel account, at the same time with the miracle of the Transfiguration above. But I almost prefer to this the Foligno picture: the child with the casket below is of all things the most Raphaelesque, for the sweetness of expression, and the rich pulpy texture of the flesh; and perhaps I prefer even to this the Crowning of the Virgin, with that pure dignified figure of the Madonna sitting in the clouds, and that wonderous emanation of sentiment in the crowd below, near the vase of flowers, all whose faces are bathed in one feeling of ecstatic devotion, as the stream of inspiration flows over them. There is a singular effect of colouring in the lower part of this picture, as if it were painted on slate, and from this cold chilly ground the glow of sentiment comes out perhaps the more strong and effectual. In the same suite of apartments (accessible to students and copyists) are the Death of St. Jerome, by Domenichino; and the Vision of St. Romuald, by Andrea Sacchi, the last of the Italian painters. Five nobler or more impressive pictures are not in the world. A single figure of St. Michelle (as a pilgrim among the Alps) is a pure rich offering of the pencil to legendary devotion, and remarkable for the simplicity of the colouring, sweetness of the expression, and the gloomy splendour of the background. There are no others equally good. The Vatican contains numberless fine statues and other remains of antiquity, elegant and curious. The Apollo I do not admire, but the Laocoon appears to me admirable, for the workmanship, for the muscular contortions of the father’s figure, and the divine expression of the sentiment of pain and terror in the children. They are, however, rather small than young. Canova’s figures here seem to me the work of an accomplished sculptor, but not of a great man. Michael Angelo’s figures of Day and Night, at the Chapel of St. Lorenzo at Florence, are those of a great man; whether of a perfect sculptor or not, I will not pretend to say. The neck of the Night is curved like the horse’s, the limbs have the involution of serpents. These two figures and his transporting the Pantheon to the top of St. Peter’s, have settled my wavering idea of this mighty genius, which his David and early works at Florence had staggered. His Adam receiving life from his Creator, in the Sistine Chapel, for boldness and freedom, is more like the Elgin Theseus than any other figure I have seen. The Jeremiah in the same ceiling droops and bows the head like a willow-tree surcharged with showers. Whether there are any faces worthy of these noble figures I have not been near enough to see. Those near the bottom of the Last Judgment are hideous, vulgar caricatures of demons and cardinals, and the whole is a mass of extravagance and confusion. I shall endeavour to get a nearer view of the Prophets and Sybils in the Capella Sistina. And if I can discover an expression and character of thought in them equal to their grandeur of form, I shall not be slow to acknowledge it. Michael Angelo is one of those names that cannot be shaken without pulling down Fame itself. The Vatican is rich in pictures, statuary, tapestry, gardens, and in the views from it; but its immense size is divided into too many long and narrow compartments, and it wants the unity of effect and imposing gravity of the Louvre.
Chapter XX
There are two things that an Englishman understands, hard words and hard blows. Nothing short of this (generally speaking) excites his attention or interests him in the least. His neighbours have the benefit of the one in war time, and his own countrymen of the other in time of peace. The French express themselves astonished at the feats which our Jack Tars have so often performed. A fellow in that class of life in England will strike his hand through a deal board—first, to shew his strength, which he is proud of; secondly, to give him a sensation, which he is in want of; lastly to prove his powers of endurance, which he also makes a boast of. So qualified, a controversy with a cannon-ball is not much out of his way: a thirty-two pounder is rather an ugly customer, but it presents him with a tangible idea (a thing he is always in search of)—and, should it take off his head or carry away one of his limbs, he does not feel the want of the one or care for that of the other. Naturally obtuse, his feelings become hardened by custom; or if there are any qualms of repugnance or dismay left, a volley of oaths, a few coarse jests, and a double allowance of grog soon turn the affair into a pastime. Stung with wounds, stunned with bruises, bleeding and mangled, an English sailor never finds himself so much alive as when he is flung half dead into the cockpit; for he then perceives the extreme consciousness of his existence in his conflict with external matter, in the violence of his will, and his obstinate contempt for suffering. He feels his personal identity on the side of the disagreeable and repulsive; and it is better to feel it so than to be a stock or a stone, which is his ordinary state. Pain puts life into him; action, soul: otherwise, he is a mere log. The English are not like a nation of women. They are not thin-skinned, nervous, or effeminate, but dull and morbid: they look danger and difficulty in the face, and shake hands with death as with a brother. They do not hold up their heads, but they will turn their backs on no man: they delight in doing and in bearing more than others: what every one else shrinks from through aversion to labour or pain, they are attracted to, and go through with, and so far (and so far only) they are a great people. At least, it cannot be denied that they are a pugnacious set. Their heads are so full of this, that if a Frenchman speaks of SCRIBE, the celebrated farce-writer, a young Englishman present will suppose he means Cribb the boxer; and ten thousand people assembled at a prize-fight will witness an exhibition of pugilism with the same breathless attention and delight as the audience at the Théatre Français listen to the dialogue of Racine or Molière. Assuredly, we do not pay the same attention to Shakspeare: but at a boxing-match every Englishman feels his power to give and take blows increased by sympathy, as at a French theatre every spectator fancies that the actors on the stage talk, laugh, and make love as he would. A metaphysician might say, that the English perceive objects chiefly by their mere material qualities of solidity, inertness, and impenetrability, or by their own muscular resistance to them; that they do not care about the colour, taste, smell, the sense of luxury or pleasure:—they require the heavy, hard, and tangible only, something for them to grapple with and resist, to try their strength and their unimpressibility upon. They do not like to smell to a rose, or to taste of made-dishes, or to listen to soft music, or to look at fine pictures, or to make or hear fine speeches, or to enjoy themselves or amuse others; but they will knock any man down who tells them so, and their sole delight is to be as uncomfortable and disagreeable as possible. To them the greatest labour is to be pleased: they hate to have nothing to find fault with: to expect them to smile or to converse on equal terms, is the heaviest tax you can levy on their want of animal spirits or intellectual resources. A drop of pleasure is the most difficult thing to extract from their hard, dry, mechanical, husky frame; a civil word or look is the last thing they can part with. Hence the matter-of-factness of their understandings, their tenaciousness of reason or prejudice, their slowness to distinguish, their backwardness to yield, their mechanical improvements, their industry, their courage, their blunt honesty, their dislike to the frivolous and florid, their love of liberty out of hatred to oppression, and their love of virtue from their antipathy to vice. Hence also their philosophy, from their distrust of appearances and unwillingness to be imposed upon; and even their poetry has its probable source in the same repining, discontented humour, which flings them from cross-grained realities into the region of lofty and eager imaginations.[44]—A French gentleman, a man of sense and wit, expressed his wonder that all the English did not go and live in the South of France, where they would have a beautiful country, a fine climate, and every comfort almost for nothing. He did not perceive that they would go back in shoals from this scene of fancied contentment to their fogs and sea-coal fires, and that no Englishman can live without something to complain of. Some persons are sorry to see our countrymen abroad cheated, laughed at, quarrelling at all the inns they stop at:—while they are in hot-water, while they think themselves ill-used and have but the spirit to resent it, they are happy. As long as they can swear, they are excused from being complimentary: if they have to fight, they need not think: while they are provoked beyond measure, they are released from the dreadful obligation of being pleased. Leave them to themselves, and they are dull: introduce them into company, and they are worse. It is the incapacity of enjoyment that makes them sullen and ridiculous; the mortification they feel at not having their own way in everything, and at seeing others delighted without asking their leave, that makes them haughty and distant. An Englishman is silent abroad from having nothing to say; and he looks stupid, because he is so. It is kind words and graceful acts that afflict his soul—an appearance of happiness, which he suspects to be insincere because he cannot enter into it, and a flow of animal spirits which dejects him the more from making him feel the want of it in himself; pictures that he does not understand, music that he does not feel, love that he cannot make, suns that shine out of England, and smiles more radiant than they! Do not stifle him with roses: do not kill him with kindness: leave him some pretext to grumble, to fret, and torment himself. Point at him as he drives an English mail-coach about the streets of Paris or of Rome, to relieve his despair of éclat by affording him a pretence to horsewhip some one. Be disagreeable, surly, lying, knavish, impertinent out of compassion; insult, rob him, and he will thank you; take any thing from him (nay even his life) sooner than his opinion of himself and his prejudices against others, his moody dissatisfaction and his contempt for every one who is not in as ill a humour as he is.
John Bull is certainly a singular animal. It is the being the beast he is that has made a man of him. If he do not take care what he is about, the same ungoverned humour will be his ruin. He must have something to butt at; and it matters little to him whether it be friend or foe, provided only he can run-a-muck. He must have a grievance to solace him, a bugbear of some sort or other to keep himself in breath: otherwise, he droops and hangs the head—he is no longer John Bull, but John Ox, according to a happy allusion of the Poet-Laureate’s. This necessity of John’s to be repulsive (right or wrong) has been lately turned against himself, to the detriment of others, and his proper cost. Formerly, the Pope, the Devil, the Inquisition, and the Bourbons, served the turn, with all of whom he is at present sworn friends, unless Mr. Canning should throw out a tub to a whale in South America: then Bonaparte took the lead for awhile in John’s panic-struck brain; and latterly, the Whigs and the Examiner newspaper have borne the bell before all other topics of abuse and obloquy. Formerly, liberty was the word with John,—now it has become a bye-word. Whoever is not determined to make a slave and a drudge of him, he defies, he sets at, he tosses in the air, he tramples under foot; and after having mangled and crushed whom he pleases, stands stupid and melancholy (fænum in cornu) over the lifeless remains of his victim. When his fury is over, he repents of what he has done—too late. In his tame fit, and having made a clear stage of all who would or could direct him right, he is led gently by the nose by Mr. Croker; and the ‘Stout Gentleman’ gets upon his back, making a monster of him. Why is there a tablet stuck up in St. Peter’s at Rome, to the memory of the three last of the Stuarts? Is it a baisés mains to the Pope, or a compromise with legitimacy? Is the dread of usurpation become so strong, that a reigning family are half-ready to acknowledge themselves usurpers, in favour of those who are not likely to come back to assert their claim, and to countenance the principles that may keep them on a throne, in lieu of the paradoxes that placed them there? It is a handsome way of paying for a kingdom with an epitaph, and of satisfying the pretensions of the living and the dead. But we did not expel the slavish and tyrannical Stuarts from our soil by the volcanic eruption of 1688, to send a whining Jesuitical recantation and writ of error after them to the other world a hundred years afterwards. But it may be said that the inscription is merely a tribute of respect to misfortune. What! from that quarter? No! it is a ‘lily-livered,’ polished, courtly, pious monument to the fears that have so long beset the hearts of Monarchs, to the pale apparitions of Kings dethroned or beheaded in time past or to come (from that sad example) to the crimson flush of victory, which has put out the light of truth, and to the reviving hope of that deathless night of ignorance and superstition, when they shall once more reign as Gods upon the earth, and make of their enemies their footstool! Foreigners cannot comprehend this bear-garden work of ours at all: they ‘perceive a fury, but nothing wherefore.’ They cannot reconcile the violence of our wills with the dulness of our apprehensions, nor account for the fuss we make about nothing; our convulsions and throes without end or object, the pains we take to defeat ourselves and others, and to undo all that we have ever done, sooner than any one else should share the benefit of it. They think it is strange, that out of mere perversity and contradiction we would rather be slaves ourselves, than suffer others to be free; that we back out of our most heroic acts and disavow our favourite maxims (the blood-stained devices in our national coat of arms) the moment we find others disposed to assent to or imitate us, and that we would willingly see the last hope of liberty and independence extinguished, sooner than give the smallest credit to those who sacrifice every thing to keep the spark alive, or abstain from joining in every species of scurrility, insult, and calumny against them, if the word is once given by the whippers-in of power. The English imagination is not riante: it inclines to the gloomy and morbid with a heavy instinctive bias, and when fear and interest are thrown into the scale, down it goes with a vengeance that is not to be resisted, and from the effects of which it is not easy to recover. The enemies of English liberty are aware of this weakness in the public mind, and make a notable use of it.
‘But that two-handed engine at the door Stands ready to smite once and smite no more.’
Give a dog an ill name, and hang him—so says the proverb. The courtiers say, ‘Give a patriot an ill name, and ruin him’ alike with Whig and Tory—with the last, because he hates you as a friend to freedom; with the first, because he is afraid of being implicated in the same obloquy with you. This is the reason why the Magdalen Muse of Mr. Thomas Moore finds a taint in the Liberal; why Mr. Hobhouse visits Pisa, to dissuade Lord Byron from connecting himself with any but gentlemen-born, for the credit of the popular cause. Set about a false report or insinuation, and the effect is instantaneous and universally felt—prove that there is nothing in it, and you are just where you were. Something wrong somewhere, in reality or imagination, in public or in private, is necessary to the minds of the English people: bring a charge against any one, and they hug you to their breasts: attempt to take it from them, and they resist it as they would an attack upon their persons or property: a nickname is to their moody, splenetic humour a freehold estate, from which they will not be ejected by fair means or foul: they conceive they have a vested right in calumny. No matter how base the lie, how senseless the jest, it tells—because the public appetite greedily swallows whatever is nauseous and disgusting, and refuses, through weakness or obstinacy, to disgorge it again. Therefore Mr. Croker plies his dirty task—and is a Privy-councillor; Mr. Theodore Hook calls Mr. Waithman ‘Lord Waithman’ once a week, and passes for a wit!
I had the good fortune to meet the other day at Paris with my old fellow-student Dr. E——, after a lapse of thirty years; he is older than I by a year or two, and makes it five-and-twenty. He had not been idle since we parted. He sometimes looked in, after having paid La Place a visit; and I told him it was almost as if he had called on a star in his way. It is wonderful how friendship, that has long lain unused, accumulates like money at compound interest. We had to settle a long account, and to compare old times and new. He was naturally anxious to learn the state of our politics and literature, and was not a little mortified to hear that England, ‘whose boast it was to give out reformation to the world,’ had changed her motto, and was now bent on propping up the continental despotisms, and on lashing herself to them. He was particularly mortified at the degraded state of our public press—at the systematic organization of a corps of government-critics to decry every liberal sentiment, and proscribe every liberal writer as an enemy to the person of the reigning sovereign, only because he did not avow the principles of the Stuarts. I had some difficulty in making him understand the full lengths of the malice, the lying, the hypocrisy, the sleek adulation, the meanness, equivocation, and skulking concealment, of a Quarterly Reviewer,[45]
the reckless blackguardism of Mr. Blackwood, and the obtuse drivelling profligacy of the John Bull. He said, ‘It is worse with you than with us: here an author is obliged to sacrifice twenty mornings and twenty pair of black silk-stockings, in paying his court to the Editors of different journals, to ensure a hearing from the public; but with you, it seems, he must give up his understanding and his character, to establish a claim to taste or learning.’ He asked if the scandal could not be disproved, and retorted on the heads of the aggressors: but I said that these were persons of no character, or studiously screened by their employers; and besides, the English imagination was a bird of heavy wing, that, if once dragged through the kennel of Billingsgate abuse, could not well raise itself out of it again. He could hardly believe that under the Hanover dynasty (a dynasty founded to secure us against tyranny) a theatrical licenser had struck the word ‘tyrant’ out of Mr. Shee’s tragedy, as offensive to ears polite, or as if from this time forward there could be supposed to be no such thing in rerum naturâ; and that the common ejaculation, ‘Good God!’ was erased from the same piece, as in a strain of too great levity in this age of cant. I told him that public opinion in England was at present governed by half a dozen miscreants, who undertook to bait, hoot, and worry every man out of his country, or into an obscure grave, with lies and nicknames, who was not prepared to take the political sacrament of the day, and use his best endeavours (he and his friends) to banish the last traces of freedom, truth, and honesty from the land. ‘To be direct and honest is not safe.’ To be a Reformer, the friend of a Reformer, or the friend’s friend of a Reformer, is as much as a man’s peace, reputation, or even life is worth. Answer, if it is not so, pale shade of Keats, or living mummy of William Gifford! Dr. E—— was unwilling to credit this statement, but the proofs were too flagrant. He asked me what became of that band of patriots that swarmed in our younger days, that were so glowing-hot, desperate, and noisy in the year 1794? I said I could not tell; but referred him to our present Poet-Laureate for an account of them!
——‘Can these things be, And overcome us like a summer-cloud, Without a special wonder?’
I suspect it is peculiar to the English not to answer the letters of their friends abroad. They know you are anxious to hear, and have a surly, sullen pleasure in disappointing you. To oblige is a thing abhorrent to their imaginations; to be uneasy at not hearing from home just when one wishes, is a weakness which they cannot encourage. Any thing like a responsibility attached to their writing is a kind of restraint upon their free-will, an interference with their independence. There is a sense of superiority in not letting you know what you wish to know, and in keeping you in a state of helpless suspense. Besides, they think you are angry at their not writing, and would make them if you could; and they show their resentment of your impatience and ingratitude by continuing not to write.—One thing truly edifying in the accounts from England, is the number of murders and robberies with which the newspapers abound. One would suppose that the repetition of the details, week after week, and day after day, might stagger us a little as to our superlative idea of the goodness, honesty, and industry of the English people. No such thing: whereas one similar fact occurring once a year abroad fills us with astonishment, and makes us ready to dub the Italians (without any further inquiry) a nation of assassins and banditti. It is not safe to live or travel among them. Is it not strange, that we should persist in drawing such wilful conclusions from such groundless premises? A murder or a street-robbery in London is a matter of course[46]: accumulate a score of these under the most aggravated circumstances one upon the back of the other, in town and country, in the course of a few weeks—they all go for nothing; they make nothing against the English character in the abstract; the force of prejudice is stronger than the weight of evidence. The process of the mind is this; and absurd as it appears, is natural enough. We say (to ourselves) we are English, we are good people, and therefore the English are good people. We carry a proxy in our bosoms for the national character in general. Our own motives are ‘very stuff o’ the conscience,’ and not like those of barbarous foreigners. Besides, we know many excellent English people, and the mass of the population cannot be affected in the scale of morality by the outrages of a few ruffians, which instantly meet with the reward they merit from wholesome and excellent laws. We are not to be moved from this position, that the great body of the British public do not live by thieving and cutting the throats of their neighbours, whatever the accounts in the newspapers might lead us to suspect. The streets are lined with bakers’, butchers’, and haberdashers’ shops, instead of night-cellars and gaming-houses; and are crowded with decent, orderly, well-dressed people, instead of being rendered impassable by gangs of swindlers and pickpockets. The exception does not make the rule. Nothing can be more clear or proper; and yet if a single Italian commit a murder or a robbery, we immediately form an abstraction of this individual case, and because we are ignorant of the real character of the people or state of manners in a million of instances, take upon us, like true Englishmen, to fill up the blank, which is left at the mercy of our horror-struck imaginations, with bugbears and monsters of every description. We should extend to others the toleration and the suspense of judgment we claim; and I am sure we stand in need of it from those who read the important head of ‘ACCIDENTS AND OFFENCES’ in our Journals. It is true an Italian baker, some time ago, shut his wife up in an oven, where she was burnt to death; the heir of a noble family stabbed an old woman to rob her of her money; a lady of quality had her step-daughter chained to a bed of straw, and fed on bread and water till she lost her senses. This translated into vulgar English means that all the bakers’ wives in Italy are burnt by their husbands at a slow fire; that all the young nobility are common bravoes; that all the step-mothers exercise unheard-of and unrelenting cruelty on the children of a former marriage. We only want a striking frontispiece to make out a tragic volume. As the traveller advances into the country, robbers and rumours of robbers fly before him with the horizon. In Italy,
‘Man seldom is—but always to be robbed.’
At Turin, they told me it was not wise to travel by a vetturino to Florence without arms. At Florence, I was told one could not walk out to look at an old ruin in Rome, without expecting to see a Lazzaroni start from behind some part of it with a pistol in his hand. ‘There’s no such thing;’ but hatred has its phantoms as well as fear; and the English traduce and indulge their prejudices against other nations in order to have a pretence for maltreating them. This moral delicacy plays an under-game to their political profligacy. I am at present kept from proceeding forward to Naples by imaginary bands of brigands that infest the road the whole way. The fact is, that a gang of banditti, who had committed a number of atrocities and who had their haunts in the mountains near Sonino, were taken up about three years ago, to the amount of two and thirty: four of them were executed at Rome, and their wives still get their living in this city by sitting as models to artists, on account of the handsomeness of their features and the richness of their dresses. As to courtesans, from which one cannot separate the name of Italy even in idea, I have seen but one person answering to this description since I came, and I do not even know that this was one. But I saw a girl in white (an unusual thing) standing at some distance at the corner of one of the bye-streets in Rome; after looking round her for a moment, she ran hastily up the street again, as if in fear of being discovered, and a countryman who was passing with a cart at the time, stopped to look and hiss after her. If the draymen in London were to stop to gape and hoot at all the girls they see standing at the corners of streets in a doubtful capacity, they would have enough to do. But the tide of public prostitution that pours down all our streets is considered by some moralists as a drain to carry off the peccant humours of private life, and to keep the inmost recesses of the female breast sweet and pure from blemish! If this is to be the test, we have indeed nearly arrived at the idea of a perfect commonwealth.
Cicisbeism is still kept up in Italy, though somewhat on the decline. I have nothing to say in favour of that anomaly in vice and virtue. The English women are particularly shocked at it, who are allowed to hate their husbands, provided they do not like any body else. It is a kind of marriage within a marriage; it begins with infidelity to end in constancy; it is not a state of licensed dissipation, but is a real chain of the affections, superadded to the first formal one, and that often lasts for life. A gay captain in the Pope’s Guard is selected by a lady as her cavalier servente in the prime of life, and is seen digging in the garden of the family in a grey jacket and white hairs thirty years after. This does not look like a love of change. The husband is of course always a fixture; not so the cavalier servente, who is liable to be removed for a new favourite. In noble families the lover must be noble; and he must be approved by the husband. A young officer, who the other day volunteered this service to a beautiful Marchioness without either of these titles, and was a sort of interloper on the intended gallant, was sent to Volterra. Whatever is the height to which this system has been carried, or the level to which it has sunk, it does not appear to have extinguished jealousy in all its excess as a part of the national character, as the following story will shew: it is related by M. Beyle, in his charming little work, entitled De l’Amour, as a companion to the famous one in Dante; and I shall give the whole passage in his words, as placing the Italian character (in former as well as latter times) in a striking point of view.
‘I allude,’ he says, ‘to those touching lines of Dante;—
‘Deh! quando tu sarai tornato al mondo, Ricordati di me, che son la Pia; Sienna mi fê: disfecemi Maremma: Salsi colui, che inannellata pria, Disposando, m’avea con la sua gemma.’—Purgatorio, c. 5.
‘The woman who speaks with so much reserve, had in secret undergone the fate of Desdemona, and had it in her power, by a single word, to have revealed her husband’s crime to the friends whom she had left upon earth.
‘Nello della Pietra obtained in marriage the hand of Madonna Pia, sole heiress of the Ptolomei, the richest and most noble family of Sienna. Her beauty, which was the admiration of all Tuscany, gave rise to a jealousy in the breast of her husband, that, envenomed by false reports and by suspicions continually reviving, led to a frightful catastrophe. It is not easy to determine at this day if his wife was altogether innocent; but Dante has represented her as such. Her husband carried her with him into the marshes of Volterra, celebrated then, as now, for the pestiferous effects of the air. Never would he tell his unhappy wife the reason of her banishment into so dangerous a place. His pride did not deign to pronounce either complaint or accusation. He lived with her alone, in a deserted tower, of which I have been to see the ruins on the sea-shore; here he never broke his disdainful silence, never replied to the questions of his youthful bride, never listened to her entreaties. He waited unmoved by her for the air to produce its fatal effects. The vapours of this unwholesome swamp were not long in tarnishing features the most beautiful, they say, that in that age had appeared upon earth. In a few months she died. Some chroniclers of these remote times report, that Nello employed the dagger to hasten her end: she died in the marshes in some horrible manner; but the mode of her death remained a mystery, even to her contemporaries. Nello della Pietra survived to pass the rest of his days in a silence which was never broken.
‘Nothing can be conceived more noble or more delicate than the manner in which the ill-fated Pia addresses herself to Dante. She desires to be recalled to the memory of the friends whom she had quitted so young: at the same time, in telling her name and alluding to her husband, she does not allow herself the smallest complaint against a cruelty unexampled, but thenceforth irreparable; and merely intimates that he knows the history of her death. This constancy in vengeance and in suffering is to be met with, I believe, only among the people of the South. In Piedmont, I found myself the involuntary witness of a fact almost similar; but I was at the time ignorant of the details. I was ordered with five-and-twenty dragoons into the woods that border the Sesia, to prevent the contraband traffic. On my arrival in the evening at this wild and solitary place, I distinguished among the trees the ruins of an old castle: I went to it: to my great surprise, it was inhabited. I there found a Nobleman of the country, of a very unpromising aspect; a man six feet in height, and forty years of age: he allowed me a couple of apartments with a very ill grace. Here I entertained myself by getting up some pieces of music with my quarter-master: after the expiration of some days, we discovered that our host kept guard over a woman whom we called Camilla in jest: we were far from suspecting the dreadful truth. She died at the end of six weeks. I had the melancholy curiosity to see her in her coffin; I bribed a monk who had charge of it, and towards midnight, under pretext of sprinkling the holy water, he conducted me into the chapel. I there saw one of those fine faces, which are beautiful even in the bosom of death: she had a large aquiline nose, of which I never shall forget the noble and expressive outline. I quitted this mournful spot; but five years after, a detachment of my regiment accompanying the Emperor to his coronation as King of Italy, I had the whole story recounted to me. I learned that the jealous husband, the Count of ——, had one morning found, hanging to his wife’s bedside, an English watch belonging to a young man in the little town where they lived. The same day he took her to the ruined castle, in the midst of the forests of the Sesia. Like Nello della Pietra, he uttered not a single word. If she made him any request, he presented to her sternly and in silence the English watch, which he had always about him. In this manner he passed nearly three years with her. She at length fell a victim to despair, in the flower of her age. Her husband attempted to dispatch the owner of the watch with a stiletto, failed, fled to Genoa, embarked there, and no tidings have been heard of him since. His property was confiscated.’—De l’Amour, vol i. p. 131.
This story is interesting and well told. One such incident, or one page in Dante or in Spenser is worth all the route between this and Paris, and all the sights in all the post-roads in Europe. Oh Sienna! if I felt charmed with thy narrow, tenantless streets, or looked delighted through thy arched gateway over the subjected plain, it was that some recollections of Madonna Pia hung upon the beatings of my spirit, and converted a barren waste into the regions of romance!
Chapter XXI
We had some thoughts of taking a lodging at L’Ariccia, at the Caffé del Piazza, for a month, but the deep sandy roads, the centinels posted every half-mile on this, which is the route for Naples (which shewed that it was not very safe to leave them), the loose, straggling woods sloping down to the dreary marshes, and the story of Hippolitus painted on the walls of the inn (who, it seems, was ‘native to the manner here’), deterred us. L’Ariccia, besides being, after Cortona, the oldest place in Italy, is also one step towards Naples, which I had a strong desire to see—its brimming shores, its sky which glows like one entire sun, Vesuvius, the mouth of Hell, and Sorrentum, like the Islands of the Blest—yet here again the reports of robbers, exaggerated alike by foreigners and natives, who wish to keep you where you are, the accounts of hogs without hair, and children without clothes to their backs, the vermin (animal as well as human), the gilded hams and legs of mutton that Forsyth speaks of, gave me a distaste to the journey, and I turned back to put an end to the question. I am fond of the sun, though I do not like to see him and the assassin’s knife glaring over my head together. As to the real amount of the danger of travelling this road, as far as I can learn, it is this—there is at present a possibility but no probability of your being robbed or kidnapped, if you go in the day-time and by the common method of a Vetturino, stopping two nights on the road. If you go alone, and with a determination to set time, place, and circumstances at defiance, like a personified representation of John Bull, maintaining the character of your countrymen for sturdiness and independence of spirit, you stand a very good chance of being shot through the head: the same thing might happen to you, if you refused your money to an English footpad; but if you give it freely, like a gentleman, and do not stand too nicely upon a punctilio, they let you pass like one. If you have no money about you, you must up into the mountain, and wait till you can get it. For myself, my remittances have not been very regular even in walled towns; how I should fare in this respect upon the forked mountain, I cannot tell, and certainly I have no wish to try. A friend of mine said that he thought it the only romantic thing going, this of being carried off by the banditti; that life was become too tame and insipid without such accidents, and that it would not be amiss to put one’s-self in the way of such an adventure, like putting in for the grand prize in the lottery. Assuredly, one is not likely to go to sleep in such circumstances: one person who was detained in this manner, and threatened every hour with being despatched, went mad in consequence. A French Artist was laid hold of by a gang of the outlaws, as he was sketching in the neighbourhood of their haunts, about a year ago; he did not think their mode of life at all agreeable. As he had no money, they employed him in making sketches of their heads, with which they were exceedingly delighted. Their vanity kept him continually on the alert when they had a moment’s leisure; and, besides, he was fatigued almost to death, for they made long marches of from forty to fifty miles a day, and scarcely ever rested more than one night in the same place. They travelled through bye-roads (in constant apprehension of the military) in parties of five or six, and met at some common rendezvous at night-fall. He was in no danger from them in the day-time; but at night they sat up drinking and carousing, and when they were in this state of excitement, he was in considerable jeopardy from their violence or sportive freaks: they amused themselves with presenting their loaded pieces at his breast, or threatened to dispatch him if he did not promise to procure ransom. At last he effected his escape in one of their drunken bouts. Their seizure of the Austrian officer last year was singular enough: they crept for above a mile on their hands and knees, from the foot of the mountain which was their place of retreat, and carried off their prize in the same manner, so as to escape the notice of the sentinels who were stationed at short distances on the road side. Some years since a plan was laid to carry off Lucien Buonaparte from his villa at Frascati, about eleven miles from Rome, on the Albano side, where the same range of Apennines begins: he was walking in his garden and saw them approaching through some trees, for his glance is quick and furtive; he retired into the house, his valet came out to meet them, who passed himself off for his master, they were delighted with their sham-prize, and glad to take 4,000 crowns to release him. Since then Lucien Buonaparte has lived in Rome. I remember once meeting this celebrated character in the streets of Paris, walking arm in arm with Maria Cosway, with whom I had drunk tea the evening before. He was dressed in a light drab-coloured great-coat, and was then a spirited, dashing-looking young man. I believe I am the only person in England who ever read his CHARLEMAGNE. It is as clever a poem as can be written by a man who is not a poet. It came out in two volumes quarto, and several individuals were applied to by the publishers to translate it; among others Sir Walter Scott, who gave for answer, ‘that as to Mister Buonaparte’s poem, he should have nothing to do with it.’ Such was the petty spite of this understrapper of greatness and of titles, himself since titled, the scale of whose intellect can be equalled by nothing but the pitifulness and rancour of his prejudices! The last account I have heard of the exploits of Neapolitan banditti is, that they had seized upon two out of three Englishmen, who had determined upon passing through Calabria on their way to Sicily, and were proceeding beyond Pæstum for this purpose. They were told by the Commandant there, that this was running into the lion’s mouth, that there were no patrols to protect them farther, and that they were sure to be intercepted; but an Englishman’s will is his law—they went forward—and succeeded in getting themselves into the only remaining romantic situation. I have not heard whether they have yet got out of it. The national propensity to contend with difficulty and to resist obstacles is curious, perhaps praiseworthy. A young Englishman returned the other day to Italy with a horse that he had brought with him for more than two thousand miles on the other side of Grand Cairo; and poor Bowdich gave up the ghost in a second attempt to penetrate to the source of the Niger, the encouragement to persevere being in proportion to the impossibility of success! I am myself somewhat effeminate, and would rather ‘the primrose path of dalliance tread;’ or the height of my ambition in this line would be to track the ancient route up the valley of the Simplon, leaving the modern road (much as I admire the work and the workman), and clambering up the ledges of rocks, and over broken bridges, at the risk of a sprained ankle or a broken limb, to return to a late, but excellent dinner at the post-house at Brigg!
What increases the alarm of robbers in the South of Italy, is the reviving of old stories, like the multiplication of echoes, and shifting their dates indefinitely, so as to excite the fears of the listener, or answer the purposes of the speaker. About three years ago, a desperate gang of ruffians infested the passes of the Abruzzi, and committed a number of atrocities; but this gang, to the amount of about thirty, were seized and broken up, their ringleaders beheaded in the Square di Popolo at Rome, and their wives or mistresses now live there by sitting for their pictures to English artists. The remainder figure as convicts in striped yellow and brown dresses in the streets of Rome, and very civilly pull off their hats to strangers as they pass. By the way, I cannot help reprobating this practice of employing felons as common labourers in places of public resort. Either you must be supposed to keep up your feelings of dislike and indignation against them while thus mixing with the throng and innocently employed, which is a disagreeable and forced operation of the sense of justice; or if you retain no such feelings towards these victims of the law, then why do they retain the chains on their feet and ugly badges on their shoulders? If the thing is to be treated seriously, it is painful: if lightly and good-humouredly, it turns the whole affair into a farce or drama, with as little of the useful as the pleasant in it. I know nothing of these people that I see manacled and branded, but that they are labouring in a broiling sun for my convenience; if one of them were to break loose, I should not care to stop him. When we witness the punishments of individuals, we should know their crimes; or at least their punishment and their delinquency should not be mixed up indiscriminately with the ordinary gaieties and business of human life. It is a chapter of the volume that should be read apart! About six months ago, twenty-two brigands came down from the mountains at Velletri, and carried off four young women from the village. A Vetturino, who wished me to return with him to Florence, spoke of this as having happened the week before. There is a band of about ninety banditti scattered through the mountains near Naples. Some years ago they were the terror of travellers: at present they are more occupied in escaping from the police themselves. But by thus confounding dates and names, all parts of the road are easily filled all the year round with nothing but robbers and rumours of robbers. In short, any one I believe can pass with proper precaution from Rome to Naples and back again, with tolerable, if not with absolute security. If he can guard equally against petty thieving and constant imposition for the rest of his route, it will be well.
Before leaving Rome, we went to Tivoli, of which so much has been said. The morning was bright and cloudless; but a thick mist rose from the low, rank, marshy grounds of the Campagna, and enveloped a number of curious objects to the right and left, till we approached the sulphurous stream of Solfatara, which we could distinguish at some distance by its noise and smell, and which crossing the road like a blue ugly snake, infects the air in its hasty progress to the sea. The bituminous lake from which it springs is about a mile distant, and has the remains of an ancient temple on its borders. Farther on is a round brick tower, the tomb of the Plautian family, and Adrian’s villa glimmers with its vernal groves and nodding arches to the right. In Rome, around it nothing strikes the eye, nothing rivets the attention but ruins, the fragments of what has been; the past is like a halo forever surrounding and obscuring the present! Ruins should be seen in a desert, like those of Palmyra, and a pilgrimage should be made to them; but who would take up his abode among tombs? Or if there be a country and men in it, why have they nothing to shew but the relics of antiquity, or why are the living contented to crawl about like worms, or to hover like shadows in the monuments of the dead? Every object he sees reminds the modern Roman that he is nothing—the spirits of former times overshadow him, and dwarf his pigmy efforts: every object he sees reminds the traveller that greatness is its own grave. Glory cannot last; for when a thing is once done, it need not be done again, and with the energy to act, a people lose the privilege to be. They repose upon the achievements of their ancestors; and because every thing has been done for them, sink into torpor, and dwindle into the counterfeits of what they were. The Greeks will not recover their freedom till they forget that they had ancestors, for nothing is twice because it was once. The Americans will perhaps lose theirs, when they begin fully to reap all the fruits of it; for the energy necessary to acquire freedom, and the ease that follows the enjoyment of it, are almost incompatible. If Italy should ever be any thing again, it will be when the tokens of her former glory, pictures, statues, triumphal arches are mouldered in the dust, and she has to re-tread the gradual stages of civilization, from primeval barbarism to the topmost round of luxury and refinement; or when some new light gives her a new impulse; or when the last oppression (such as in all probability impends over her) equally contrary to former independence, to modern apathy, stinging her to the quick, once more kindles the fire in her eye, and twines the deadly terrors on her brow. Then she might have music in her streets, the dance beneath her vines, inhabitants in her houses, business in her shops, passengers in her roads, commerce on her shores, honesty in her dealings, openness in her looks, books for the censorship, the love of right for the fear of power, and a calculation of consequences from a knowledge of principles—and England, like the waning moon, would grow pale in the rising dawn of liberty, that she had in vain tried to tarnish and obscure! Mais assez des reflexions pour un voyageur.
Tivoli is an enchanting—a fairy spot. Its rocks, its grottos, its temples, its waterfalls, and the rainbows reflected on them, answer to the description, and make a perfect play upon the imagination. Every object is light and fanciful, yet steeped in classic recollections. The whole is a fine net-work—a rare assemblage of intricate and high-wrought beauties. To do justice to the scene would require the pen of Mr. Moore, minute and striking as it is, sportive yet romantic, displaying all the fascinations of sense, and unfolding the mysteries of sentiment,
‘Where all is strength below, and all above is grace,’—
glittering like a sun-beam on the Sybil’s Temple at top, or darting on a rapid antithesis to the dark grotto of the God beneath, loading the prismatic spray with epithets, linking the meeting beauties on each side the abrupt, yawning chasm by an alliteration, painting the flowers, pointing the rocks, passing the narrow bridge on a dubious metaphor, and blending the natural and artificial, the modern and the antique, the simple and the quaint, the glimmer and the gloom in an exquisite profusion of fluttering conceits. He would be able to describe it much better, with its tiny cascades and jagged precipices, than his friend Lord Byron has described the Fall of Terni, who makes it, without any reason that I can find, tortuous, dark, and boiling like a witch’s cauldron. On the contrary, it is simple and majestic in its character, a clear mountain-stream that pours an uninterrupted, lengthened sheet of water over a precipice of eight hundred feet, in perpendicular descent, and gracefully winding its way to the channel beyond, while on one side the stained rock rises bare and stately the whole height, and on the other, the gradual green woods ascend, moistened by the ceaseless spray, and lulled by the roar of the waterfall, as the ear enjoys the sound of famous poet’s verse. If this noble and interesting object have a fault, it is that it is too slender, straight, and accompanied with too few wild or grotesque ornaments. It is the Doric, or at any rate the Ionic, among water-falls. It has nothing of the texture of Lord Byron’s terzains, twisted, zigzag, pent up and struggling for a vent, broken off at the end of a line, or point of a rock, diving under ground, or out of the reader’s comprehension, and pieced on to another stanza or shelving rock.—Nature has
‘Poured it out as plain As downright Shippen, or as old Montaigne.’
To say the truth, if Lord Byron had put it into Don Juan instead of Childe Harold, he might have compared the part which her ladyship has chosen to perform on this occasion to an experienced waiter pouring a bottle of ale into a tumbler at a tavern. It has somewhat of the same continued, plump, right-lined descent. It is not frittered into little parts, nor contrasted into quaintness, nor tortured into fury. All the intricacy and contradiction that the noble Poet ascribes to it belong to Tivoli; but then Tivoli has none of the grandeur or violence of the description in Childe Harold. The poetry is fine, but not like.
As I have got so far on my way, I may as well jump the intermediate space, and proceed with my statistics here, as there was nothing on the road between this and Rome worth mentioning, except Narni (ten miles from Terni), the approach to which overlooks a fine, bold, woody, precipitous valley. We stopped at Terni for the express purpose of visiting the Fall, which is four or five miles from it. The road is excellent, and commands a succession of charming points of view. You must pass the little village of Papinio, perched like a set of pigeon-houses on the point of a rock about half-way up, which has been battered almost in pieces by French, Austrians, and others at different times, from a fort several hundred feet above it, and that looks directly down upon the road. When you get to the top of the winding ascent, and immediately before you turn off by a romantic little path to the waterfall, you see the ranges of the Abruzzi and the frozen top of the Pie de Lupo. Along this road the Austrian troops marched three years ago to the support of good government and social order at Naples. The prospect of the cold blue mountain-tops, and other prospects which the sight of this road recalled, chilled me, and I hastened down the side-path to lose, in the roar of the Velino tumbling from its rocky height, and the wild freedom of nature, my recollection of tyranny and tyrants. On a green bank far below, so as to be just discernible, a shepherd-boy was sleeping under the shadow of a tree, surrounded by his flock, enjoying peace and freedom, scarce knowing their names. That’s something—we must wait for the rest!
We returned to the inn at Terni too late to proceed on our journey, and were thrust, as a special favour, into a disagreeable apartment. We had the satisfaction, however, to hear the united voices of the passengers by two vetturinos, French and Italian men and women, lifted up against the supper and wine as intolerably bad. The general complaint was, that having paid so much for our fare, we were treated like beggars—comme des gueux. This was true enough, and not altogether unreasonable. Let no one who can help it, and who travels for pleasure, travel by a vetturino. You are treated much in the same manner as if in England you went by the caravan or the waggon. In fact, this mode of conveyance is an imposition on innkeepers and the public. It is the result of a combination among the vetturino owners, who bargain to provide you for a certain sum, and then billet you upon the innkeepers for as little as they can, who when thus obtruded upon them, under the guarantee of a grasping stage-coach driver, consider you as common property or prey, receive you with incivility, keep out of the way, will not deign you an answer, stint you in the quantity of your provisions, poison you by the quality, order you into their worst apartments, force other people into the same room or even bed with you, keep you in a state of continual irritation and annoyance all the time you are in the house, and send you away jaded and dissatisfied with your reception, and terrified at the idea of arriving at the next place of refreshment, for fear of meeting with a renewal of the same contemptible mortifications and petty insults. You have no remedy: if you complain to the Vetturino, he says it is the fault of the innkeeper; if you remonstrate with the innkeeper, he says he has orders from the Vetturino only to provide certain things. It is of little use to try to bribe the waiters; they doubt your word, and besides, do not like to forego the privilege of treating a vetturino passenger as one. It is best, if you travel in this manner, to pay for yourself; and then you may stand some chance of decent accommodation. I was foolish enough to travel twice in this manner, and pay three Napoleons a day, for which I might have gone post, and fared in the most sumptuous manner. I ought to add, in justice, that when I have escaped from the guardianship of Monsieur le Vetturino and have stopped at inns on my own account, as was the case at Venice, Milan, and at Florence twice, I have no reason to complain either of the treatment or the expence. As to economy, it is in vain to look for it in travelling in Italy or at an hotel; and if you succeed in procuring a private lodging for a time, besides the everlasting trickery and cabal, you are likely to come off with very meagre fare, unless you can eat Italian dishes. I ought, however, to repeat what I believe I have said before, that the bread, butter, milk, wine and poultry that you get here (even ordinarily) are excellent, and that you may also obtain excellent tea and coffee.
We proceeded next morning (in no very good humour) on our way to Spoleto. The day was brilliant, and our road lay through steep and narrow defiles for several hours. The sides of the hills on each side were wild and woody; indeed, the whole ride was interesting, and the last hill before we came to Spoleto, with a fine monastery embosomed in its thick tufted trees, crowned our satisfaction with the journey. Spoleto is a handsome town, delightfully situated, and has an appearance (somewhat startling in Italy) as if life were not quite extinct in it. It stands on the slope of a range of the Apennines, extending as far as Foligno and Perugia, and ‘sees and is seen’ to a great distance. From Perugia in particular (an interval of forty miles) you seem as if you could put your hand upon it, so plain does it appear, owing to the contrast between the white stone-houses, and the dark pine-groves by which it is surrounded. The effect of this contrast is not always pleasant. The single cottages or villas scattered in the neighbourhood of towns in Italy, often look like dominos or dice spread on a dark green cloth. We arrived at Foligno early in the evening, and as a memorable exception to the rest of our route, found there an inn equally clean and hospitable. From the windows of our room we could see the young people of the town walking out in a fine open country, to breathe the clear fresh air, and the priests sauntering in groups and enjoying the otium cum dignitate. It was for some monks of Foligno that Raphael painted his inimitable Madonna.
We turned off at Assizi to view the triple Franciscan church and monastery. We saw the picture of Christ (shewn by some nuns), that used to smile upon St. Francis at his devotions; and the little chapel in the plain below, where he preached to his followers six hundred years ago, over which a large church is at present built, like Popery surmounting Christianity. The church on the top of the hill, built soon after his death in honour of the saint, and where his heart reposes, is a curiosity in its kind. First, two churches were raised, one on the top of the other, and then a third was added below with some difficulty, by means of excavations in the rock. The last boasts a modern and somewhat finical mausoleum or shrine, and the two first are ornamented with fresco paintings by Giotto and Ghirlandaio, which are most interesting and valuable specimens of the early history of the art. I see nothing to contemn in them—much to admire—fine heads, simple grouping, a knowledge of drawing and foreshortening, and dignified attitudes and expressions, some of which Raphael has not disdained to copy, though he has improved upon them. St. Francis died about 1220, and this church was finished and ornamented with these designs of the chief actions of his life, within forty months afterwards; so that the pictures in question must be about six hundred years old. We are not, however, to wonder at the maturity of these productions of the pencil; the art did not arise out of barbarism or nothing, but from a lofty preconception in the minds of those who first practised it, and applied it to purposes of devotion. Even the grace and majesty of Raphael were, I apprehend, but emanations of the spirit of the Roman Catholic religion, and existed virtually in the minds of his countrymen long before and after he transferred them, with consummate skill, to the canvass. Not a Madonna scrawled on the walls near Rome, not a baby-house figure of the Virgin, that is out of character and costume, or that is not imbued with an expression of resignation, benignity, and purity. We were shewn these different objects by a young priest, who explained them to us with a gracefulness of manner, and a mild eloquence, characteristic of his order. I forgot to mention, in the proper place, that I was quite delighted with the external deportment of the ecclesiastics in Rome. It was marked by a perfect propriety, decorum, and humanity, from the highest to the lowest. Not the slightest look or gesture to remind you that you were foreigners or heretics—an example of civility that is far from being superfluous, even in the capital of the Christian world. It may be said that this is art, and a desire to gain upon the good opinion of strangers. Be it so, but it must be allowed that it is calculated to this end. Good manners have this advantage over good morals, that they lie more upon the surface; and there is nothing, I own, that inclines me to think so well of the understandings or dispositions of others, as a thorough absence of all impertinence. I do not think they can be the worst people in the world who habitually pay most attention to the feelings of others; nor those the best who are endeavouring every moment to hurt them. At Perugia, while looking at some panels in a church painted by Pietro Perugino, we met with a young Irish priest, who claimed acquaintance with us as country-folks, and recommended our staying six days, to see the ceremonies and finery attending the translation of the deceased head of his order from the church where he lay to his final resting-place. We were obliged by this proposal, but declined it. It was curious to hear English spoken by the inmate of a Benedictine Monastery,—to see the manners of an Italian priest engrafted on the Irish accent—to think that distant countries are brought together by agreement in religion—that the same country is rent asunder by differences in it. Man is certainly an ideal being, whom the breath of an opinion wafts from Indus to the Pole, and who is ready to sacrifice the present world and every object in it for a reversion in the skies! Perugia is situated on a lofty hill, and is in appearance the most solid mass of building I ever beheld. It commands a most extensive view in all directions, and the ascent to it is precipitous on every side. Travelling this road from Rome to Florence is like an eagle’s flight—from hill-top to hill-top, from towered city to city, and your eye devours your way before you over hill or plain. We saw Cortona on our right, looking over its wall of ancient renown, conscious of its worth, not obtruding itself on superficial notice; and passed through Arezzo, the reputed birth-place of Petrarch. All the way we were followed (hard upon) by another Vetturino, with an English family, and we had a scramble whenever we stopped for supper, beds, or milk. At Incisa, the last stage before we arrived at Florence, an intimation was conveyed that we should give up our apartments in the inn, and seek for lodgings elsewhere. This modest proposition could come only from English people, who have such an opinion of their dormant stock of pretended good-nature, that they think all the world must in return be ready to give up their own comforts to oblige them. We had two French gentlemen in the coach with us, equally well-behaved and well-informed, and two Italians in the cabriolet, as good-natured and ‘honest as the skin between their brows.’ Near Perugia we passed the celebrated lake of Thrasymene, near which Hannibal defeated the Roman consul Flaminius. It struck me as not unlike Windermere in character and scenery, but I have seen other lakes since, which have driven it out of my head. Florence (the city of flowers) seemed to deserve its name as we entered it for the second time more than it did the first. The weather had been cold during part of our journey, but now it had changed to sultry heat. The people looked exceedingly plain and hard-featured, after having passed through the Roman States. They have the look of the Scotch people, only fiercer and more ill-tempered.
Chapter XXII
I have already described the road between Florence and Bologna. I found it much the same on returning; for barren rocks and mountains undergo little alteration either in summer or winter. Indeed, of the two, I prefer the effect in the most dreary season, for it is then most complete and consistent with itself: on some kinds of scenery, as on some characters, any attempt at the gay and pleasing sits ill, and is a mere piece of affectation. There is so far a distinction between the Apennines and Alps, that the latter are often covered with woods, and with patches of the richest verdure, and are capable of all the gloom of winter or the bloom of spring. The soil of the Apennines, on the contrary, is as dry and gritty as the rocks themselves, being nothing but a collection of sand-heaps and ashes, and mocks at every idea that is not of a repulsive and disagreeable kind. We stopped the first night at Traversa, a miserable inn or almost hovel on the road side, in the most desolate part of this track; and found amidst scenes, which the imagination and the pen of travellers have peopled with ghastly phantoms and the assassin’s midnight revelry, a kind but simple reception, and the greatest sweetness of manners, prompted by the wish, but conscious of being perhaps without the means to please. Courtesy in cities or palaces goes for little, means little, for it may and must be put on; in the cottage or on the mountain-side it is welcome to the heart, for it comes from it. It then has its root in unsophisticated nature, without the gloss of art, and shews us the original goodness of the soil or germ, from which human affections and social intercourse in all their ramifications spring. A little boy clung about its mother, wondering at the strangers; but from the very thoughts of novelty and distance, nestling more fondly in the bosom of home. What is the map of Europe, what all the glories of it, what the possession of them, to that poor little fellow’s dream, to his sidelong glance at that wide world of fancy that circles his native rocks!
The second morning, we reached the last of the Apennines that overlook Bologna, and saw stretched out beneath our feet a different scene, the vast plain of Lombardy, and almost the whole of the North of Italy, like a rich sea of boundless verdure, with towns and villas spotting it like the sails of ships. A hazy inlet of the Adriatic appeared to the right (probably the Gulph of Comachio). We strained our eyes in vain to catch a doubtful view of the Alps, but they were still sunk below the horizon. We presently descended into this plain (which formed a perfect contrast to the country we had lately passed), and it answered fully to the promise it had given us. We travelled for days, for weeks through it, and found nothing but ripeness, plenty, and beauty. It may well be called the Garden of Italy or of the World. The whole way from Bologna to Venice, from Venice to Milan, it is literally so. But I anticipate.—We went to our old inn at Bologna, which we liked better the second time than the first; and had just time to snatch a glimpse of the Guidos and Domenichinos at the Academy, which gleamed dark and beautiful through the twilight. We set out early the next morning on our way to Venice, turning off to Ferrara. It was a fine spring morning. The dew was on the grass, and shone like diamonds in the sun. A refreshing breeze fanned the light-green odorous branches of the trees, which spread their shady screen on each side of the road, which lay before us as straight as an arrow for miles. Venice was at the end of it; Padua, Ferrara, midway. The prospect (both to the sense and to the imagination) was exhilarating; and we enjoyed it for some hours, till we stopped to breakfast at a smart-looking detached inn at a turning of the road, called, I think, the Albergo di Venezia. This was one of the pleasantest places we came to during the whole of our route. We were shewn into a long saloon, into which the sun shone at one extremity, and we looked out upon the green fields and trees at the other. There were flowers in the room. An excellent breakfast of coffee, bread, butter, eggs, and slices of Bologna sausages was served up with neatness and attention. An elderly female, thin, without a cap, and with white thread-stockings, watched at the door of a chamber not far from us, with the patience of an eastern slave. The door opened, and a white robe was handed out, which she aired carefully over a chaffing-dish with mechanical indifference, and an infinite reduplication of the same folds. It was our young landlady who was dressing for church within, and who at length issued out, more remarkable for the correctness of her costume than the beauty of her person. Some rustics below were playing at a game, that from the incessant loud jarring noises of counting that accompanied it, implied equally good lungs and nerves in the performers and by-standers. At the tinkling of a village bell, all was in a moment silent, and the entrance of a little chapel was crowded with old and young, kneeling in postures of more or less earnest devotion. We walked forward, delighted with the appearance of the country, and with the simple manners of the inhabitants; nor could we have proceeded less than four or five miles along an excellent footpath, but under a broiling sun, before we saw any signs of our Vetturino, who was willing to take this opportunity of easing his horses—a practice common with those sort of gentry. Instead of a fellow-feeling with you, you find an instinctive inclination in persons of this class all through Italy to cheat and deceive you: the more easy or cordial you are with them, the greater is their opinion of your folly and their own cunning, and the more are they determined to repel or evade any advances to a fair understanding: threaten, or treat them with indignity, and you have some check over them; relax the reins a moment, and they are sure to play you some scurvy trick.
At Ferrara we were put on short allowance, and as we found remonstrance vain, we submitted in silence. We were the more mortified at this treatment, as we had begun to hope for better things; but Mr. Henry Waister, our Commissary on the occasion, was determined to make a good thing of his three Napoleons a-day; he had strained a point in procuring us a tolerable supper and breakfast at the two last stages, which must serve for some time to come; and as he would not pay for our dinner, the landlord would not let us have one, and there the matter rested. We walked out in the evening, and found Ferrara enchanting. Of all the places I have seen in Italy, it is the one by far I should most covet to live in. It is the ideal of an Italian city, once great, now a shadow of itself. Whichever way you turn, you are struck with picturesque beauty and faded splendours, but with nothing squalid, mean, or vulgar. The grass grows in the well-paved streets. You look down long avenues of buildings, or of garden walls, with summer-houses or fruit-trees projecting over them, and airy palaces with dark portraits gleaming through the grated windows—you turn, and a chapel bounds your view one way, a broken arch another, at the end of the vacant, glimmering, fairy perspective. You are in a dream, in the heart of a romance; you enjoy the most perfect solitude, that of a city which was once filled with ‘the busy hum of men,’ and of which the tremulous fragments at every step strike the sense, and call up reflection. In short, nothing is to be seen of Ferrara, but the remains, graceful and romantic, of what it was—no sordid object intercepts or sullies the retrospect of the past—it is not degraded and patched up like Rome, with upstart improvements, with earthenware and oil-shops; it is a classic vestige of antiquity, drooping into peaceful decay, a sylvan suburb—
‘Where buttress, wall and tower Seem fading fast away From human thoughts and purposes, To yield to some transforming power, And blend with the surrounding trees.’
Here Ariosto lived—here Tasso occupied first a palace, and then a dungeon. Verona has even a more sounding name; boasts a finer situation, and contains the tomb of Juliet. But the same tender melancholy grace does not hang upon its walls, nor hover round its precincts as round those of Ferrara, inviting to endless leisure and pensive musing. Ferrara, while it was an independent state, was a flourishing and wealthy city, and contained 70,000 inhabitants; but from the time it fell into the hands of the Popes, in 1597, it declined, and it has now little more than an historical and poetical being.
From Ferrara we proceeded through Rovigo to Padua the Learned, where we were more fortunate in our inn, and where, in the fine open square at the entrance, I first perceived the rage for vulgar and flaunting statuary, which distinguishes the Lombardo-Venetian States. The traveller to Venice (who goes there to see the masterpieces of Titian or Palladio’s admired designs), runs the gauntlet all the way along at every town or villa he passes, of the most clumsy, affected, paltry, sprawling figures, cut in stone, that ever disgraced the chisel. Even their crucifixes and common Madonnas are in bad taste and proportion. This inaptitude for the representation of forms in a people, whose eye for colours transcended that of all the world besides, is striking as it is curious: and it would be worth the study of a man’s whole life to give a true and satisfactory solution of the mystery. Padua, though one of the oldest towns in Italy, is still a place of some resort and bustle; among other causes, from the number of Venetian families who are in the habit of spending the summer months there. Soon after leaving it, you begin to cross the canals and rivers which intersect this part of the country bordering upon the sea, and for some miles you follow the course of the Brenta along a flat, dusty, and unprofitable road. This is a period of considerable and painful suspense, till you arrive at Fusina, where you are put into a boat and rowed down one of the Lagunes, where over banks of high rank grass and reeds, and between solitary sentry-boxes at different intervals, you see Venice rising from the sea. For an hour and a half, that it takes you to cross from the last point of land to this Spouse of the Adriatic, its long line of spires, towers, churches, wharfs is stretched along the water’s edge, and you view it with a mixture of awe and incredulity. A city built in the air would be something still more wonderful; but any other must yield the palm to this for singularity and imposing effect. If it were on the firm land, it would rank as one of the first cities in Europe for magnificence, size, and beauty; as it is, it is without a rival. I do not know what Lord Byron and Lady Morgan could mean by quarrelling about the question who first called Venice ‘the Rome of the sea’—since it is perfectly unique in its kind. If a parallel must be found for it, it is more like Genoa shoved into the sea. Genoa stands on the sea, this in it. The effect is certainly magical, dazzling, perplexing. You feel at first a little giddy: you are not quite sure of your footing as on the deck of a vessel. You enter its narrow, cheerful canals, and find that instead of their being scooped out of the earth, you are gliding amidst rows of palaces and under broad-arched bridges, piled on the sea-green wave. You begin to think that you must cut your liquid way in this manner through the whole city, and use oars instead of feet. You land, and visit quays, squares, market-places, theatres, churches, halls, palaces; ascend tall towers, and stroll through shady gardens, without being once reminded that you are not on terra firma. The early inhabitants of this side of Italy, driven by Attila and his hordes of Huns from the land, sought shelter in the sea, built there for safety and liberty, laid the first foundations of Venice in the rippling wave, and commerce, wealth, luxury, arts, and crimson conquest crowned the growing Republic;—
‘And Ocean smil’d, Well pleased to see his wondrous child.’
Man, proud of his amphibious creation, spared no pains to aggrandize and embellish it, even to extravagance and excess. The piles and blocks of wood on which it stands are brought from the huge forests at Treviso and Cadore: the stones that girt its circumference, and prop its walls, are dug from the mountains of Istria and Dalmatia: the marbles that inlay its palace-floors are hewn from the quarries near Verona. Venice is loaded with ornament, like a rich city-heiress with jewels. It seems the natural order of things. Her origin was a wonder: her end is to surprise. The strong, implanted tendency of her genius must be to the showy, the singular, the fantastic. Herself an anomaly, she reconciles contradictions, liberty with aristocracy, commerce with nobility, the want of titles with the pride of birth and heraldry. A violent birth in nature, she lays greedy, perhaps ill-advised, hands on all the artificial advantages that can supply her original defects. Use turns to gaudy beauty; extreme hardship to intemperance in pleasure. From the level uniform expanse that forever encircles her, she would obviously affect the aspiring in forms, the quaint, the complicated, relief and projection. The richness and foppery of her architecture arise from this: its stability and excellence probably from another circumstance counteracting this tendency to the buoyant and fluttering, viz., the necessity of raising solid edifices on such slippery foundations, and of not playing tricks with stone-walls upon the water. Her eye for colours and costume she would bring with conquest from the East. The spirit, intelligence, and activity of her men, she would derive from their ancestors: the grace, the glowing animation and bounding step of her women, from the sun and mountain-breeze! The want of simplicity and severity in Venetian taste seems owing to this, that all here is factitious and the work of art: redundancy again is an attribute of commerce, whose eye is gross and large, and does not admit of the too much; and as to irregularity and want of fixed principles, we may account by analogy at least for these, from that element of which Venice is the nominal bride, to which she owes her all, and the very essence of which is caprice, uncertainty, and vicissitude!
‘And now from out the watery floor A city rose, and well she wore Her beauty, and stupendous walls, And towers that touched the stars, and halls Pillar’d with whitest marble, whence Palace on lofty palace sprung: And over all rich gardens hung, Where, amongst silver water-falls, Cedars and spice-trees, and green bowers, And sweet winds playing with all the flowers Of Persia and of Araby, Walked princely shapes; some with an air Like warriors; some like ladies fair Listening ... In supreme magnificence.’
This, which is a description of a dream of Babylon of old, by a living poet, is realized almost literally in modern Venice.