“She wishes you to be godfather to the child.”
I had never yet been a godfather, but I had the belief that it brought
grave responsibilities, which in the very casual and impermanent
circumstances I did not see how I was to meet. Yet how to refuse without
wounding these kind people who had so honored me I did not know until a
sudden inspiration came to my rescue.
“Tell them,” I said, “and be careful to make them understand, that I am
very grateful and very sorry, but that I am a Protestant, and that I
suppose I cannot, for that reason, be godfather to their child.”
He explained, and they received my thanks and regrets with smiling
acquiescence; and just then a very stout little old priest (who has
baptized nearly all the babies in Pisa for fifty years) came in, and the
baptism proceeded without my intervention. But I remained, somehow,
disappointed; it would have been pleasant to leave a godchild behind me
there in the neighborhood of Pisa; to have sent him from time to time
some little remembrance of this remote America, and, perhaps, when he
grew up and came to Pisa, and learned the art of the statuary, to have
had from him a Leaning Tower which he had cut in alabaster for me. I was
taking it for granted he was a boy, but he may not have been; there is
always that chance.
If I had been alone, I suppose I should still have gone into the Campo
Santo, from mere force of habit; I always go, in Pisa, but I had now
with me clearer eyes for art than mine are, and I wished to have their
light on the great allegories and histories frescoed round the
cloisters, and test with them the objects of my tacit and explicit
reserves and misgivings. I needed such eyes, and even some such powerful
glasses as would have pierced through the faded and wasted pictures and
shown them at least as I had first seen them. They were then in such
reasonable disrepair as one might expect after three or four centuries,
but in the last thirty years a ruinous waste has set in before which not
only the colors have faded, but the surfaces have crumbled under the
colors; and as yet no man knows how to stop the ravage. I think I have
read that it is caused by a germ; but, if not, the loss is the same, and
until a parasite for the germ is found the loss must go on, and the work
of Giotto, of Benozzo Gozzoli, of Memmi, must perish with that of the
Orgagnas, which may indeed go, for all me. Bible stories, miracles,
allegories--they are all hasting to decay, and it can be but a few years
until they shall vanish like the splendors of the dawn which they typify
in art.
In some things the ruin is not altogether to be regretted. It has
softened certain loathsome details of the charnel facts portrayed, and
in other pictures the torment and anguish of the lost souls are no
longer so painful as the old painters ascertained them. Hell in the
Campo Santo is not now the hell of other days, just as the hell of
Christian doctrine is not the hell it used to be. Death and the world
are indeed immitigable; the corpses in their coffins are as terrifying
to the gay lords and ladies who come suddenly upon them as ever they
were, though doubtless of no more lasting effect with such sinners than
they would be nowadays. But what one must chiefly lament is the waste of
the whole quaint and charming series of Scripture incidents by Benozzo
Gozzoli. This is indeed most lamentable, and after realizing the loss
one is only a little heartened by the gayety of certain grieving widows,
sitting in marble for monuments to their husbands at several points
under the arcades. What cheer they might have brought us was impaired by
the sight of the sarcophaguses and the other antiques against the walls,
which inflicted an inappeasable ache for the city where such things
abound, and brought our refluent Romesickness back full tide upon us.
More than once Pisa elsewhere did us the like involuntary unkindness;
she, too, is yellow and mellow like Rome, and she had moments of the
Piazza Navona and the Piazza di Spagna which were poignant. But she had
moments of her own when Rome could not rival her--such, for instance, as
that when she invited us from the perishing frescos of her Campo Santo
to turn our eyes on the flower-strewn field of death which the cloisters
surrounded, and where in the hallowed earth which her galleys brought
from Jerusalem her children, in their several turns, used to sleep so
sweetly and safely.
The afternoon sunlight was prolonging the day there as well as it could,
and we should have liked to linger with it as late as it would, but
there were other places in Pisa calling us, and we must go. We found our
driver, and his black-eyed boy beside him on the box, waiting for us at
the cathedral door, and we seem to have left it pretty much to them
where we should go. They decided us, if we really left it to them,
mainly for the outside of things, so that we might see as much of Pisa
as possible; but it appears to have been their notion that we ought to
visit, at least, the inside of the Church of the Knights of St.
Stephen. I do not know whether I protested or not that I had abundantly
seen this already, but, at any rate, I am now glad that they took us
there. As every traveller will pretend to remember, the main business of
the knights was to fight the Barbary pirates, and the main business of
their church is now to serve as a repository of the prows of the galleys
and the flags which they took in their battles with the infidels. There
are other monuments of their valor, but by all odds the flags will be
the most interesting to the American visitor, because of the start that
many of them will give him by their resemblance to our own banner, with
their red-and-white stripes, which the eye follows in vivid expectation
of finding the blue field of stars in the upper left-hand corner. It
never does find this, and that is the sufficient reason for holding to
the theory that our flag was copied from the armorial bearings of the
Washington family, and not taken from the standard of those paynim
corsairs; but there is poignant instant when one trembles.
We viewed, of course, the exterior of the edifice standing on the site
of the Tower of Famine, where the cruel archbishop starved the Count
Ugolino and his grandchildren to death; and we drove by the buildings of
Pisa's famous university, which we afterward fancied rather pervaded the
city with the young and ardent life of its students. It is no great
architectural presence, but there are churches and palaces to make up
for that. Everywhere you chance on them in the narrow streets and the
ample piazzas, but the palaces follow mostly the stately curve of the
Arno, where some of them have condescended to the office of hotels, and
where, I believe, one might live in economy and comfort; or, at any
rate, I should like to try. It would get rather warm there in May, and
July and August are not to be thought of, but all the other year it
would be divine, with such a prospect as can hardly be matched anywhere
else. Pisa used once to be the resort of many seeking health or warmth,
and for mere climate it ought again to come into favor. Probably there
is reasonably accessible society there, and, as the Livornese believe,
there is at least excellent opera. The time might grow long, but ought
not to be very heavy, and there is a cafe, at the very finest point of
the curve, where you can get an excellent cup of tea. Whether this
attests the resort or sojourn of many English, or the growth of the
tea-habit among the Pisans, I cannot say, but that cafe is very
charming, with students standing about in it and admiring the ladies who
come in to buy pastry, and who do not suppose there is any one there to
look at them. I am sure that the handsome mother with the pretty
daughter who lingered so long over their choice of little cakes could
not have imagined any one was looking, or she would at once have taken
macaroons and hurried away: at that cafe they have macaroons almost
three inches across, and delicious.
[Illustration: 48 WITH ALMOST ANY OF MY BACKGROUNDS]
The whole keeping was so pleasant that we hated to leave it to the
lengthening shadows from the other shore, but we were to drive down the
Arno into the promenade that follows it, I do not know how far; with the
foolish greed of travel, we wanted to get in all of Pisa that we could,
even if we tore ourselves from its most tempting morsel. But it was all
joy, and I should like, at this moment, to be starting on that
enchanting drive again. I leave the reader to imagine the lovely scenery
for himself; almost any of my many backgrounds will serve; but I will
supply him with a piece of statistics such as does not fall in
everybody's way. We noted the great number of anglers who lined the
opposite bank, with no appearance of catching anything, and I asked our
driver if they never happened to get a bite. “Not in the daytime,” he
explained, compassionately, “but as soon as the evening comes they get
all the fish they want.”
I could pour out on the reader many other Pisan statistics, but they
would be at second-hand. After long vicissitude, the city is again
almost as prosperous as she was in the heyday of her national greatness,
when she had commerce with every Levantine and Oriental port. We
ourselves saw a silk factory pouring forth a tide of pretty girls from
their work at the end of the day; there was no ruin or disrepair
noticeable anywhere, and the whole city was as clean as Rome, with
streets paved with broad, smooth flagstones where you never missed the
rubber tires which your carriage failed of. But Pisa had a great air of
resting, of taking life easily after a tumultuous existence in the long
past which she had put behind her. Throughout the Middle Ages she was
always fighting foreign foes without her walls or domestic factions
within, now the Saracens wherever she could find them or they could find
her, now the Normans in Naples, now the Cor-sicans and Sardinians, now
Lucca, now Genoa, now Florence, and now all three. Her wars with these
republics were really incessant; they were not so much wars as battles
in one long war, with a peace occasionally made during the five or ten
or fifteen years, which was no better than a truce. When she fell under
the Medici, together with her enemy Florence, she shared the death-quiet
the tyrants brought that prepotent republic, and it was the Medicean
strength probably which saved her from Lucca and Genoa, though it left
them to continue republics down to the nineteenth century. She was at
one time an oligarchy, and at another a democracy, and at another the
liege of this prince or that priest, but she was never out of trouble as
long as she possessed independence or the shadow of it. In the safe hold
of united Italy she now sits by her Arno and draws long, deep breaths,
which you may almost hear as you pass; and I hope the prospect of
increasing prosperity will not tempt her to work too hard. It does not
look as if it would.
We were getting a little anxious, but not very anxious, for that one
cannot be in Pisa, about our train back to Leghorn; though we did not
wish to go, we did not wish to be left; but our driver reassured us, and
would not let us shirk the duty of seeing the house where Galileo was
born. We found it in a long street on the thither side of the river, and
in such a poor quarter that our driver could himself afford to live only
a few doors from it. As if they had expected him to pass about this
time, his wife and his five children were sitting at his door and
playing before it. He proudly pointed them out with his whip, and one of
the little ones followed on foot far enough to levy tribute. They were
sufficiently comely children, but blond, whereas the boy on the box was
both black-eyed and black-haired. When we required an explanation of the
mystery, the father easily solved it; this boy was the child of his
first wife. If there were other details, I have forgotten them, but we
made our romance to the effect that the boy, to whose beautiful eyes we
now imputed a lurking sadness, was not happy with his step-mother, and
that he took refuge from her on the box with his father. They seemed
very good comrades; the boy had shared with his father the small cakes
we had given him at the cafe. At the station, in recognition of his
hapless lot, I gave him half a franc. By that time his father was
radiant from the small extortion I had suffered him to practice with me,
and he bade the boy thank me, which he did so charmingly that I almost,
but not quite, gave him another half-franc. Now I am sorry I did not.
Pisa was worth it.