The pride of Americans in their native scenery is brought down almost to
the level of the South Shore of Long Island in arriving home from the
Mediterranean voyage to Europe. The last thing one sees in Europe is the
rock of Gibraltar, but before that there have been the snow-topped
Maritime Alps of Italy and the gray-brown, softly rounded, velvety
heights of Spain; and one has to think very hard of the Palisades above
the point where they have been blasted away for road-making material if
one wishes to keep up one's spirits. The last time I came home the
Mediterranean way I had a struggle with myself against excusing our
sandy landscape, when we came in sight of it, with its summer cottages
for the sole altitudes, to some Italian fellow-passengers who were not
spellbound by its grandeur. I had to remember the Rocky Mountains, which
I had never seen, and all the moral magnificence of our life before I
could withhold the words of apology pressing to my lips. I was glad that
I succeeded; but now, going back by the same route, I abandoned myself
to transports in the beauty of the Mediterranean coast which I hope were
not untrue to my country. Perhaps there is no country which can show
anything like that beauty, and America is no worse off than the rest of
the world; but I am not sure that I have a right to this consolation.
Again there were those
“Silent pinnacles of aged snow,”
flushed with the Southern sun; in those sombre slopes of pine; again the
olives climbing to their gloom; again the terraced vineyards and the
white farmsteads, with villages nestling in the vast clefts of the
hills, and all along the sea-level the blond towns and cities which
broidei the hem of the land from Marseilles to Genoa. One is willing to
brag; one must be a good American; but, honestly, have we anything like
that to show the arriving foreigner? For some reason our ship was
abating the speed with which she had crossed the Atlantic, and now she
was swimming along the Mediterranean coasts so slowly and so closely
that it seemed as if we could almost have cast an apple ashore, though
probably we could not. We were at least far enough off to mistake Nice
for Monte Carlo and then for San Remo, but that was partly because our
course was so leisurely, and we thought we must have passed Nice long
before we did. It did not matter; all those places were alike beautiful
under the palms of their promenades, with their scattered villas and
hotels stretching along their upper levels, and the ranks of shops and
dwellings solidly forming the streets which left the shipping of their
ports to climb to the gardens and farms beyond the villas. Cannes,
Mentone, Ventimiglia, Ospedeletti, Bordighera, Taggia, Alassio: was that
their fair succession, or did they follow in another order? Once more it
did not matter; what is certain is that the golden sun of the soft
January afternoon turned to crimson and left the last of them suffused
in dim rose before we drifted into Genoa and came to anchor at dusk
beside a steamer which had left New York on the same day as ours. By her
vast size we could measure our own and have an objective perception of
our grandeur. We had crossed in one of the largest ships afloat, but
you cannot be both spectacle and spectator; and you must match your
magnificence with some rival magnificence before you can have a due
sense of it. That was what we now got at Genoa, and we could not help
pitying the people on that other ship, who must have suffered shame from
our overwhelming magnitude; the fact that she was of nearly the same
tonnage as our own ship had nothing to do with the case.
[Illustration: 06 DAUGHTERS OF CLIMATE ALONG THE RIVIERA]
After the creamy and rosy tints of those daughters of climate along the
Riviera, it was pleasant to find a many-centuried mother of commerce
like Genoa of the dignified gray which she wears to the eye, whether it
looks down on her from the heights above her port or up at her from the
thickly masted and thickly funnelled waters of the harbor. Most European
towns have red tiled roofs, which one gets rather tired of putting into
one's word paintings, but the roofs of Genoa are gray tiled, and gray
are her serried house walls, and gray her many churches and bell-towers.
The sober tone gratifies your eye immensely, and the fact that your eye
has noted it and not attributed the conventional coloring of southern
Europe to the city is a flattery to your pride which you will not
refuse. It is not a setting for opera like Naples; there is something
businesslike in it which agrees with your American mood if you are true
to America, and recalls you to duty if you are not.
I had not been in Genoa since 1864 except for a few days in 1905, and I
saw changes which I will mostly not specify. Already at the earlier date
the railway had cut through the beautiful and reverend Doria garden and
left the old palace some scanty grounds on the sea-level, where commerce
noisily encompassed it with trains and tracks and lines of freight-cars.
But there had remained up to my last visit that grot on the gardened
hill-slope whence a colossal marble Hercules helplessly overlooked the
offence offered by the railroad; and now suddenly here was the lofty
wall of some new edifice stretching across in front of the Hercules and
wholly shutting him from view; for all I know it may have made him part
of its structure.
Let this stand for a type of the change which had passed upon Genoa and
has passed or is passing upon all Italy. The trouble is that Italy is
full of very living Italians, the quickest-witted people in the world,
who are alert to seize every chance for bettering themselves financially
as they have bettered themselves politically. For my part, I always
wonder they do not still rule the world when I see how intellectually
fit they are to do it, how beyond any other race they seem still
equipped for their ancient primacy. Possibly it is their ancient primacy
which hangs about their necks and loads them down. It is better to have
too little past, as we have, than too much, as they have. But if
antiquity hampers them, they are tenderer of its vast mass than we are
of our little fragments of it; tenderer than any other people, except
perhaps the English, have shown themselves; but when the time comes that
the past stands distinctly in the way of the future, down goes the past,
even in Italy. I am not saying that I do not see why that railroad could
not have tunnelled under the Doria garden rather than cut through it;
and I am waiting for that new building to justify its behavior toward
that poor old Hercules; but in the mean time I hold that Italy is for
the Italians who now live in it, and have to get that better living out
of it which we others all want our countries to yield us; and that it is
not merely a playground for tourists who wish to sentimentalize it, or
study it, or sketch it, or make copy of it, as I am doing now.
All the same I will not deny that I enjoyed more than any of the
improvements which I noted in Genoa that bit of the old Doria
palace-grounds which progress has left it. The gray edifice looks out on
the neighboring traffic across the leanness of a lovely old garden, with
statues and stone seats, and in the midst a softly soliloquizing
fountain, painted green with moss and mould. When you enter the palace,
as you do in response to a custodian who soon comes with a key and asks
if you would like to see it, you find yourself, one flight up, in a long
glazed gallery, fronting on the garden, which is so warm with the sun
that you wish to spend the rest of your stay in Genoa there. It is
frescoed round with classically imagined portraits of the different
Dorias, and above all the portrait of that great hero of the republic. I
do not know that this portrait particularly impresses you; if you have
been here before you will be reserving yourself for the portrait which
the custodian will lead you to see in the ultimate chamber of the rather
rude old palace, where it is like a living presence.
It is the picture of a very old man in a flat cap, sitting sunken
forward in his deep chair, with his thin, long hands folded one on the
other, and looking wearily at you out of his faded eyes, in which dwell
the memories of action in every sort and counsel in every kind. Victor
in battles by land and sea, statesman and leader and sage, he looks it
all in that wonderful effigy, which shuns no effect of his more than
ninety years, but confesses his great age as a part of his greatness
with a pathetic reality. The white beard, with “each particular hair”
defined, falling almost to the pale, lean hands, is an essential part of
the presentment, which is full of such scrupulous detail as the eye
would unconsciously take note of in confronting the man himself and
afterward supply in the remembrance of the whole. As if it were a part
of his personality, on a table facing him, covered with maps and papers,
sits the mighty admiral's cat, which, with true feline im-passiveness,
ignores the spectator and gives its sole regard to the admiral. There
are possibly better portraits in the world than this, which was once by
Sebastiano del Piombo and is now by Titian; but I remember none which
has moved me more.
We tried in vain for a photograph of it, and then after a brief glance
at the riches of the Church of the Annunziata, where we were followed
around the interior by a sacristan who desired us to note that the
pillars were “All inlady, all inlady” with different marbles, and, after
a chilly moment in San Lorenzo, which the worshippers and the masons
were sharing between them in the prayers and repairs always going on in
cathedrals, we drove for luncheon to the hotel where we had sojourned in
great comfort three years before. Genoa has rather a bad name for its
hotels, but we had found this one charming, perhaps because when we had
objected to going five flights up the landlord had led us yet a floor
higher, that we might walk into the garden. It is so in much of Genoa,
where the precipitous nature of the site makes this vivid contrast
between the levels of the front door and the back gate. Many of the
streets have been widened since Heine saw the gossiping neighbors
touching knees across them, but nothing less than an earthquake could
change the temperamental topography of the place. It has its advantages;
when there is a ring at the door the housemaid, instead of panting up
from the kitchen to answer it, has merely to fall down five pairs of
stairs. It cannot be denied, either, that the steep incline gives a
charm to the streets which overcome it with sidewalks and driveways and
trolley-tracks. Such a street as the Via Garibaldi (there is a Via
Garibaldi in every Italian city, town, and village, and ought to be a
dozen), compactly built, but giving here and there over the houses'
shoulders glimpses of the gardens lurking behind them, is of a dignity
full of the energy which a flat thoroughfare never displays or imparts.
Without the inspiration lent us by the street, I am sure we should never
have got to the top of it with our cab when we went to the Campo Santo;
and, as it was, we had to help our horses upward by involuntarily
straining forward from our places. But the Campo Santo was richly worth
the effort, for to visit that famous cemetery is to enjoy an experience
of which it is the unique opportunity.
I wish to celebrate it because it seems to me one of the frankest
expressions of national taste and nature, and I do like simplicity--in
others. The modern Italians are the most literal of the realists in all
the arts, and, as I had striven for reality in my own poor way, I was
perhaps the more curious to see its effects in sculpture which I had
heard of so much. I will own that they went far beyond my expectation
and possibly my wishes; but it is not to be supposed that it is only
inferior artists who have abandoned themselves to the excesses of
fidelity so abundant in the Campo Santo. There are, of course, enough
poor falterings of allegory and tradition in the marble walls and floors
of this vast residence of the dead (as it gives you the cheerful
impression of being), but the characteristic note of the place is a
realism braving it out in every extreme of actuality. Possibly the fact
is most striking in that death-bed scene where the family, life-size and
unsparingly portraitured, and, as it were, photographed in marble, are
gathered in the room of the dying mother. She lies on a bedstead which
bears every mark of being one of a standard chamber-set in the early
eighteen-seventies, and about her stand her husband and her sons and
daughters and their wives and husbands, in the fashions of that day. I
recall a brother, in a cutaway coat, and a daughter, in a tie-back,
embraced in their grief and turning their faces away from their mother
toward the spectator; and doubtless there were others whom to describe
in their dress would render as grotesque. It is enough to say that the
artist, of a name well known in Italy and of uncommon gift, has been as
true to the moment in their costume as to the eternal humanity in their
faces. He has done what the sculptor or painter of the great periods of
art used to do with their historical and scriptural people--he has put
them in the dress of his own time and place; and it is impossible to
deny him a convincing logic. No sophistry or convention of drapery in
the scene could have conveyed its pathos half so well, or indeed at all.
It does make you shudder, I allow; it sets your teeth on edge; but then,
if you are a real man or woman, it brings the lump into your throat; the
smile fails from your lip; you pay the tribute of genuine pity and awe.
I will not pretend that I was so much moved by the meeting in heaven of
a son and father: the spirit of the son in a cutaway, with a derby hat
in his hand, gazing with rapture into the face of the father's spirit in
a long sack-coat holding his marble bowler elegantly away from his side,
if I remember rightly. But here the fact wanted the basis of simplicity
so strong in the other scene; in the mixture of the real and the ideal
the group was romanticistic.
There are innumerable other portrait figures and busts in which the
civic and social hour is expressed. The women's hair is dressed in this
fashionable way or that; the men's beards are cut in conformity to the
fashion or the personal preference in side whiskers or mustache or
imperial or goatee; and their bronze or marble faces convey the
contemporary character of aristocrat or bourgeois or politician or
professional. I do not know just what the reader would expect me to say
in defence of the full-length figure of a lady in _decollete_ and
trained evening dress, who enters from the tomb toward the spectator as
if she were coming into a drawing-room after dinner. She is very
beautiful, but she is no longer very young, and the bare arms, which
hang gracefully at her side, respond to an intimation of _embonpoint_ in
the figure, with a slightly flabby over-largeness where they lose
themselves in the ample shoulders. Whether this figure is the fancy of
the sorrowing husband or the caprice of the defunct herself, who wished
to be shown to after-time as she hoped she looked in the past, I do not
know; but I had the same difficulty with it as I had with that father
and son; it was romanticistic. Wholly realistic and rightly actual was
that figure of an old woman who is said to have put by all her savings
from the grocery business that she might appear properly in the Campo
Santo, and who is shown there short and stout and common, in her
ill-fitting best dress, but motherly and kind and of an undeniable and
touching dignity.
If I am giving the reader the impression that I went to the Campo Santo
in my last stop at Genoa, I am deceiving him; I record here the memories
of four years ago. I did not revisit the place, but I should like to see
it again, if only to revive my recollections of its unique interest. I
did really revisit the Pal-lavicini-Durazzo palace, and there revived
the pleasure I had known before in its wonderful Van Dycks. Most
wonderful was and will always be the “Boy in White,” the little serene
princeling, whoever he was, in whom the painter has fixed forever a
bewitching mood and moment of childhood. “The Mother with two Children”
is very well and self-evidently true to personality and period and
position; but, after all, she is nothing beside that “Boy in White,”
though she and her children are otherwise so wonderful. Now that I speak
of her, however, she rather grows upon my recollection as a woman
greater than her great world and proudly weary of it.
[Illustration: 07 TYPICAL MONUMENT IN THE CAMPO SANTO]
She was a lady of that very patrician house whose palace, in its cold
grandeur and splendor, renews at once all one's faded or fading sense of
the commercial past of Italy, when her greatest merchants were her
greatest nobles and dwelt in magnificence unparalleled yet since Rome
began to be old. Genoa, Venice, Pisa, Florence, what state their
business men housed themselves in and environed themselves with! Their
palaces by the hundreds were such as only the public edifices of our
less simple State capitols could equal in size and not surpass in cost.
Their _folie des grandeurs_ realized illusions in architecture, in
sculpture, and in painting which the assembled and concentrated feats of
those arts all the way up and down Fifth Avenue, and in the millionaire
blocks eastward could not produce the likeness of. We have the same
madness in our brains; we have even a Roman megalomania, but the effect
of it in Chicago or Pittsburg or Philadelphia or New York has not yet
got beyond a ducal or a princely son-in-law. The splendors of such
alliances have still to take substantial form in a single instance
worthy to compare with a thousand instances in the commercial republics
of Italy. This does not mean that our rich people have not so much money
as the Italians of the Renaissance, but that perhaps in their _folie des
grandeurs_ they are a different kind of madmen; it means also that land
and labor are dearer positively and comparatively with us, and that our
pork-packing or stock-broking princes prefer to spend on comfort rather
than size in their houses, and do not like the cold feet which the
merchant princes of Italy must have had from generation to generation. I
shall always be sorry I did not wear arctics when I went to the
Pallavicini-Durazzo palace, and I strongly urge the reader to do so
when he goes.
He will not so much need them out-of-doors in a Genoese January, unless
a _tramontana_ is blowing, and there was none on our half-day. But in
any case we did not walk. We selected the best-looking cab-horse we
could find, and he turned out better than his driver, who asked a
fabulous price by the hour. We obliged him to show his tariff, when his
wickedness was apparent from the printed rates. He explained that the
part we were looking at was obsolete, and he showed us another part,
which was really for drives outside the city; but we agreed to pay it,
and set out hoping for good behavior from him that would make up the
difference. Again we were deceived; at the end he demanded a franc
beyond even his unnatural fare. I urged that one should be reasonable;
but he seemed to think not, and to avoid controversy I paid the
extortionate franc. I remembered that just a month before, in New York,
I had paid an extortionate dollar in like circumstances.
Nevertheless, that franc above and beyond the stipulated extortion
impoverished me, and when we came to take a rowboat back to our steamer
I beat the boatman down cruelly, mercilessly. He was a poor, lean little
man, with rather a superannuated boat, and he labored harder at the oar
than I could bear to see without noting his exertion to him. This was
fatal; instantly he owned that I was right, and he confessed, moreover,
that he was the father of a family, and that some of his children were
then suffering from sickness as well as want. What could one do but make
the fare up to the first demand of three francs after having got the
price down to one and a half? At the time it seemed to me that I was
somehow by this means getting the better of the cabman who had obliged
me to pay a franc more than his stipulated extortion, but I do not now
hope to make it appear so to the reader.