If the half-hour between Leghorn and Pisa had been spent in any less
lovely transit, I should still be grieving for the loss of the thirty
minutes which might so much better have been given to either place. But
with the constant line of mountains enclosing the landscape on the
right, in all its variety of tillage, pasture-land, vineyard, and
orchard, and the unchanging level which had once been the bed of the
sea, we were gainers in sort beyond the gift of those cities. We had the
company, great part of the way, of more stone-pines than we had seen
even between Naples and Rome, here gathering into thick woods, with the
light beautiful beneath the spread of their horizontal boughs, there
grouped in classic groves, and yonder straying off in twos and threes.
We had the canal that of old time made Pisa a port of the Mediterranean,
with Leghorn for her servant on the shore (or, if it was not this canal,
it was another as straight and long), with a peasant walking beside it,
under a light-green umbrella, in the showers which threatened our start
but spared our arrival. We had then the city, with its domes and towers,
grown full height out of the plain through which the Arno curves in the
stateliest crescent of all its course.
The day had turned finer than any other day I can now think of in my
whole life, and I was once more in Pisa without the care for its history
or art or even novelty which had corroded my mind in former visits. I
had been there twice before--once in 1864, when I had done its wonders
with all the wonder they merited, and again in 1883, when I had lived
its memories on the scene of its manifold and mighty experiences. No
distinct light from that learning vexed my present vision, but an
agreeable mist of association, nothing certain, nothing tangible
remaining, but only a gentle vague involving everything, in which I
could possess my soul in peace. In this glimmer I recognized a certain
cabman as having been waiting there from the dawn of time, with his
dark-eyed little son, to make me his willing captive at something above
the tariff rates, but destined by the same fate to serve me well, and to
part with me friends at the close of the day for a franc more than the
excess agreed upon. It costs so small a sum to corrupt the common
carrier in Italy that I hold it wrong to fail of any chance, and this
driver had not only a horse of uncommon qualities, but he spoke a
beautiful Tuscan, and he had his Pisa at his fingers' ends.
[Illustration: 47 THE CATHEDRAL, BAPTISTERY, AND LEANING TOWER, PISA]
We were of one mind about driving without delay to the famous group
which is without rival on the earth, though there may be associated
edifices in the red planet Mars that surpass the Cathedral, the Leaning
Tower, the Baptistery, and the Campo Santo at Pisa. What genius it was
imagined placing them in the pleasant meadow where they sit, just beyond
the city streets, I do not know, but it was inspiration beyond any
effect of mere taste, and it commanded my worship as much the last as
the first time. The meadow still swims round them and breaks in a foam
of daisies at their feet; for I take it that it is always mid-April
there, and that the grass is as green and the sun as yellow on it as the
afternoon we saw it. The sacred edifices are as golden as the light on
them, and there is such a joyous lift in the air that it is a wonder
they do not swing loose from their foundations and soar away into the
celestial blue. For travellers in our willing mood there was, of course,
the predestined cicerone waiting for us at the door of the cathedral,
who would fix no price for the pleasure he was born to do us, yet still
consented to take more than twice that he ought to have had at parting.
But he was worth the money; he was worth quite two francs, and, though
he was not without the fault of his calling and would have cumbered us
with instruction, I will not blame him, for after a moment I perceived
that his intelligence was such that I might safely put my hands in my
pocket on my shut guide-book and follow him from point to point without
fear of missing anything worth noting. Among the things worthiest
noting, I saw, as if I had never seen them before, the unforgettable,
forgotten Andrea del Sartos, especially the St. Agnes, in whose face you
recognize the well-known features of the painter's wife, but with a
gentler look than they usually wore in his Madonnas, perhaps because he
happened to study these from that difficult lady when she was in her
least celestial moods. Besides the masterpieces of other masters, there
is a most noble Sodoma, which the great Napoleon carried away to Paris
and which the greater French people afterward restored. At every step in
the beautiful temple you may well pause, for it abounds in pictures and
sculptures, the least of which would enrich St. Peter's at Rome beyond
the proudest effect of its poverty-stricken grandeur. Ghirlandajo,
Michelangelo, Gaddo Gaddi, John of Bologna--the names came back to me
out of a past of my own almost as remote as theirs, while our guide
repeated them, in their relation to the sculptures or pictures or
architecture, with those of lesser lights of art, and that school of
Giotto, of all whose frescos once covering its walls the fire of three
hundred years ago has left a few figures clinging to one of the pillars,
faint and uncertain as the memories of my own former visits to the
church. I did, indeed, remember me of an old bronze lamp, by Vincenzo
Possenti, hanging from the roof, which I now revered the third time, at
intervals of twenty years; from its oscillation Galileo is said to have
got the notion of the pendulum; but it is now tied back with a wire,
being no longer needed for such an inspiration. Mostly in this last
visit I took Pisa as lightly as at the first, when, as I have noted from
the printed witness, I was gayly indifferent to the claims of her
objects of interest. If they came in my way, I looked at them, but I did
not put myself much about for them. I rested mostly in the twilight of
old associations, trusting to the guidance of our cicerone, whom, in
some form or under some name, the reader will find waiting for him at
the cathedral door as we did. But I have since recurred to the record of
my second visit in 1883, with amazement at the exact knowledge of events
shown there, which became, in 1908, all a blur of dim conjecture. It
appears that I was then acquainted with much more Pisan history than any
other author I have found own to. I had also surprising adventures of
different kinds, such as my poorer experience of the present cannot
parallel. I find, for instance, that in 1883 I gave a needy crone in the
cathedral a franc instead of the piece of five centimes which I meant
for her, and that the lamp of Galileo did nothing to light the gloom
into which this error plunged my spirit.
It appears to have jaundiced my view of the whole cathedral, which I did
not find at all comparable to that of Siena, whereas in 1908 I thought
it all beautiful. This may have been because I was so newly from the
ugliness of the Eoman churches; though I felt, as I had felt before,
that the whole group of sacred edifices at Pisa was too suggestive of
decorative pastry and confectionery. No more than at the second view of
it did I now attempt the ascent of the Leaning Tower; I had discharged
this duty for life when I first saw it; with my seventy-one years upon
me, I was not willing to climb its winding stairs, and I doubted if I
could keep it from falling, as I then did, by inclining myself the other
way. I resolved that I would leave this to the new-comer; but I gladly
followed our cicerone across the daisied green from the cathedral to the
baptistery, where I found the famous echo waiting to welcome me back,
and greet me with its angelic sweetness, when the custodian who has it
in charge appealed to it; though its voice seemed to have been weakened
and coarsened in its forced replies to some rude Americans there, who
shouted out to it and mocked at it. One wished to ask them if they did
not know that this echo was sacred, and that their challenges of it were
a species of sacrilege. But doubtless that would not have availed to
silence them. By-and-by they went away, and then we were aware of an
interesting group of people by the font near the lovely Lombardic pulpit
of Nicola Pisano. They were peasants, by their dress--a young father and
mother and a little girl or two, and then a gentle, elderly woman, with
a baby in her arms, at which she looked proudly down. They were in their
simple best, and they had good Tuscan faces, full of kindness. I
ventured some propitiatory coppers with the children, and, when the old
woman made them thank me, I thought I could not be mistaken and I
ventured further: “You are the grandmother?”
“Yes, signer,” she answered; and then we had some talk about the age and
the beauty of the baby, which I declared wonderful for both, in praises
loud enough for the father and mother to hear. After that they seemed to
hold a family council, from which I thought it respectful to stand apart
until the grandmother spoke to me again.