which, near the sea as they were, and right in the course of the wind as
it blew against the house, made everything hotter than if there had been
no wind. "One feels it most, on first getting up. Then, it is really so
oppressive that a strong determination is necessary to enable one to go
on dressing; one's tendency being to tumble down anywhere and lie
there." It seemed to hit him, he said, behind the knee, and made his
legs so shake that he could not walk or stand. He had unfortunately a
whole week of this without intermission, soon after his arrival; but
then came a storm, with wind from the mountains; and he could bear the
ordinary heat very well. What at first had been a home-discomfort, the
bare walls, lofty ceilings, icy floors, and lattice blinds, soon became
agreeable; there were regular afternoon breezes from the sea; in his
courtyard was a well of very pure and very cold water; there were new
milk and eggs by the bucketful, and, to protect from the summer insects
these and other dainties, there were fresh vine-leaves by the thousand;
and he satisfied himself, by the experience of a day or two in the city,
that he had done well to come first to its suburb by the sea. What
startled and disappointed him most were the frequent cloudy days.[79] He
opened his third letter (3rd of August) by telling me there was a thick
November fog, that rain was pouring incessantly, and that he did not
remember to have seen in his life, at that time of year, such cloudy
weather as he had seen beneath Italian skies.
"The story goes that it is in autumn and winter, when other countries
are dark and foggy, that the beauty and clearness of this are most
observable. I hope it may prove so; for I have postponed going round
the hills which encircle the city, or seeing any of the sights, until
the weather is more favourable.[80] I have never yet seen it so clear,
for any longer time of the day together, as on a bright, lark-singing,
coast-of-France-discerning day at Broadstairs; nor have I ever seen so
fine a sunset, _throughout_, as is very common there. But the scenery is
exquisite, and at certain periods of the evening and the morning the
blue of the Mediterranean surpasses all conception or description. It is
the most intense and wonderful colour, I do believe, in all nature."
In his second letter from Albaro there was more of this subject; and an
outbreak of whimsical enthusiasm in it, meant especially for Maclise, is
followed by some capital description. "I address you, my friend," he
wrote, "with something of the lofty spirit of an exile, a banished
commoner, a sort of Anglo-Pole. I don't exactly know what I have done
for my country in coming away from it, but I feel it is something;
something great; something virtuous and heroic. Lofty emotions rise
within me, when I see the sun set on the blue Mediterranean. I am the
limpet on the rock. My father's name is Turner, and my boots are
green. . . . Apropos of blue. In a certain picture called the Serenade for
which Browning wrote that verse[81] in Lincoln's-inn-fields, you, O Mac,
painted a sky. If you ever have occasion to paint the Mediterranean, let
it be exactly of that colour. It lies before me now, as deeply and
intensely blue. But no such colour is above me. Nothing like it. In the
south of France, at Avignon, at Aix, at Marseilles, I saw deep blue
skies; and also in America. But the sky above me is familiar to my
sight. Is it heresy to say that I have seen its twin brother shining
through the window of Jack Straw's--that down in Devonshire-terrace I
have seen a better sky? I dare say it is; but like a great many other
heresies, it is true. . . . But such green, green, green, as flutters in
the vineyard down below the windows, _that_ I never saw; nor yet such
lilac and such purple as float between me and the distant hills; nor yet
in anything, picture, book, or vestal boredom, such awful, solemn,
impenetrable blue, as in that same sea. It has such an absorbing,
silent, deep, profound effect, that I can't help thinking it suggested
the idea of Styx. It looks as if a draught of it, only so much as you
could scoop up on the beach in the hollow of your hand, would wash out
everything else, and make a great blue blank of your intellect. . . . When
the sun sets clearly, then, by Heaven, it is majestic. From any one of
eleven windows here, or from a terrace overgrown with grapes, you may
behold the broad sea, villas, houses, mountains, forts, strewn with rose
leaves. Strewn with them? Steeped in them! Dyed, through and through and
through. For a moment. No more. The sun is impatient and fierce (like
everything else in these parts), and goes down headlong. Run to fetch
your hat--and it's night. Wink at the right time of black night--and
it's morning. Everything is in extremes. There is an insect here that
chirps all day. There is one outside the window now. The chirp is very
loud: something like a Brobdingnagian grasshopper. The creature is born
to chirp; to progress in chirping; to chirp louder, louder, louder; till
it gives one tremendous chirp and bursts itself. That is its life and
death. Everything is 'in a concatenation accordingly.' The day gets
brighter, brighter, brighter, till it's night. The summer gets hotter,
hotter, hotter, till it explodes. The fruit gets riper, riper, riper,
till it tumbles down and rots. . . . Ask me a question or two about fresco:
will you be so good? All the houses are painted in fresco, hereabout
(the outside walls I mean, the fronts, backs, and sides), and all the
colour has run into damp and green seediness; and the very design has
straggled away into the component atoms of the plaster. Beware of
fresco! Sometimes (but not often) I can make out a Virgin with a
mildewed glory round her head, holding nothing in an undiscernible lap
with invisible arms; and occasionally the leg or arm of a cherub. But
it is very melancholy and dim. There are two old fresco-painted vases
outside my own gate, one on either hand, which are so faint that I never
saw them till last night; and only then, because I was looking over the
wall after a lizard who had come upon me while I was smoking a cigar
above, and crawled over one of these embellishments in his retreat. . . ."
That letter sketched for me the story of his travel through France, and
I may at once say that I thus received, from week to week, the "first
sprightly runnings" of every description in his _Pictures from Italy_.
But my rule as to the American letters must be here observed yet more
strictly; and nothing resembling his printed book, however distantly,
can be admitted into these pages. Even so my difficulty of rejection
will not be less; for as he had not actually decided, until the very
last, to publish his present experiences at all, a larger number of the
letters were left unrifled by him. He had no settled plan from the
first, as in the other case.
[Illustration]
His most valued acquaintance at Albaro was the French consul-general, a
student of our literature who had written on his books in one of the
French reviews, and who with his English wife lived in the very next
villa, though so oddly shut away by its vineyard that to get from the
one adjoining house to the other was a mile's journey.[82] Describing,
in that August letter, his first call from this new friend thus
pleasantly self-recommended, he makes the visit his excuse for breaking
off from a facetious description of French inns to introduce to me a
sketch, from a pencil outline by Fletcher, of what bore the imposing
name of the Villa di Bella vista, but which he called by the homelier
one of its proprietor, Bagnerello. "This, my friend, is quite accurate.
Allow me to explain it. You are standing, sir, in our vineyard, among
the grapes and figs. The Mediterranean is at your back as you look at
the house: of which two sides, out of four, are here depicted. The lower
story (nearly concealed by the vines) consists of the hall, a
wine-cellar, and some store-rooms. The three windows on the left of the
first floor belong to the sala, lofty and whitewashed, which has two
more windows round the corner. The fourth window _did_ belong to the
dining-room, but I have changed one of the nurseries for better air; and
it now appertains to that branch of the establishment. The fifth and
sixth, or two right-hand windows, sir, admit the light to the
inimitable's (and uxor's) chamber; to which the first window round the
right-hand corner, which you perceive in shadow, also belongs. The next
window in shadow, young sir, is the bower of Miss H. The next, a nursery
window; the same having two more round the corner again. The
bowery-looking place stretching out upon the left of the house is the
terrace, which opens out from a French window in the drawing-room on the
same floor, of which you see nothing: and forms one side of the
court-yard. The upper windows belong to some of those uncounted chambers
upstairs; the fourth one, longer than the rest, being in F.'s bedroom.
There is a kitchen or two up there besides, and my dressing-room; which
you can't see from this point of view. The kitchens and other offices
in use are down below, under that part of the house where the roof is
longest. On your left, beyond the bay of Genoa, about two miles off, the
Alps stretch off into the far horizon; on your right, at three or four
miles distance, are mountains crowned with forts. The intervening space
on both sides is dotted with villas, some green, some red, some yellow,
some blue, some (and ours among the number) pink. At your back, as I
have said, sir, is the ocean; with the slim Italian tower of the ruined
church of St. John the Baptist rising up before it, on the top of a pile
of savage rocks. You go through the court-yard, and out at the gate, and
down a narrow lane to the sea. Note. The sala goes sheer up to the top
of the house; the ceiling being conical, and the little bedrooms built
round the spring of its arch. You will observe that we make no
pretension to architectural magnificence, but that we have abundance of
room. And here I am, beholding only vines and the sea for days
together. . . . Good Heavens! How I wish you'd come for a week or two, and
taste the white wine at a penny farthing the pint. It is excellent.". . .
Then, after seven days: "I have got my paper and inkstand and figures
now (the box from Osnaburgh-terrace only came last Thursday), and can
think--I have begun to do so every morning--with a business-like air, of
the Christmas book. My paper is arranged, and my pens are spread out in
the usual form. I think you know the form--Don't you? My books have not
passed the custom-house yet, and I tremble for some volumes of
Voltaire. . . . I write in the best bedroom. The sun is off the corner
window at the side of the house by a very little after twelve; and I can
then throw the blinds open, and look up from my paper, at the sea, the
mountains, the washed-out villas, the vineyards, at the blistering white
hot fort with a sentry on the drawbridge standing in a bit of shadow no
broader than his own musket, and at the sky, as often as I like. It is a
very peaceful view, and yet a very cheerful one. Quiet as quiet can be."
Not yet however had the time for writing come. A sharp attack of illness
befell his youngest little daughter, Kate, and troubled him much. Then,
after beginning the Italian grammar himself, he had to call in the help
of a master; and this learning of the language took up time. But he had
an aptitude for it, and after a month's application told me (24th of
August) that he could ask in Italian for whatever he wanted in any shop
or coffee-house, and could read it pretty well. "I wish you could see
me" (16th of September), "without my knowing it, walking about alone
here. I am now as bold as a lion in the streets. The audacity with which
one begins to speak when there is no help for it, is quite astonishing."
The blank impossibility at the outset, however, of getting native
meanings conveyed to his English servants, he very humorously described
to me; and said the spell was first broken by the cook, "being really a
clever woman, and not entrenching herself in that astonishing pride of
ignorance which induces the rest to oppose themselves to the receipt of
any information through any channel, and which made A. careless of
looking out of window, in America, even to see the Falls of Niagara." So
that he soon had to report the gain, to all of them, from the fact of
this enterprising woman having so primed herself with "the names of all
sorts of vegetables, meats, soups, fruits, and kitchen necessaries,"
that she was able to order whatever was needful of the peasantry that
were trotting in and out all day, basketed and barefooted. Her example
became at once contagious;[83] and before the end of the second week of
September news reached me that "the servants are beginning to pick up
scraps of Italian; some of them go to a weekly conversazione of servants
at the Governor's every Sunday night, having got over their
consternation at the frequent introduction of quadrilles on these
occasions; and I think they begin to like their foreigneering life."
In the tradespeople they dealt with at Albaro he found amusing points of
character. Sharp as they were after money, their idleness quenched even
that propensity. Order for immediate delivery two or three pounds of
tea, and the tea-dealer would be wretched. "Won't it do to-morrow?" "I
want it now," you would reply; and he would say, "No, no, there can be
no hurry!" He remonstrated against the cruelty. But everywhere there was
deference, courtesy, more than civility. "In a cafe a little tumbler of
ice costs something less than threepence, and if you give the waiter in
addition what you would not offer to an English beggar, say, the third
of a halfpenny, he is profoundly grateful." The attentions received from
English residents were unremitting.[84] In moments of need at the
outset, they bestirred themselves ("large merchants and grave men") as
if they were the family's salaried purveyors; and there was in especial
one gentleman named Curry whose untiring kindness was long remembered.
The light, eager, active figure soon made itself familiar in the streets
of Genoa, and he never went into them without bringing some oddity away.
I soon heard of the strada Nuova and strada Balbi; of the broadest of
the two as narrower than Albany-street, and of the other as less wide
than Drury-lane or Wych-street; but both filled with palaces of noble
architecture and of such vast dimensions that as many windows as there
are days in the year might be counted in one of them, and this not
covering by any means the largest plot of ground. I heard too of the
other streets, none with footways, and all varying in degrees of
narrowness, but for the most part like Field-lane in Holborn, with
little breathing-places like St. Martin's-court; and the widest only in
parts wide enough to enable a carriage and pair to turn. "Imagine
yourself looking down a street of Reform Clubs cramped after this odd
fashion, the lofty roofs almost seeming to meet in the perspective." In
the churches nothing struck him so much as the profusion of trash and
tinsel in them that contrasted with their real splendours of
embellishment. One only, that of the Cappucini friars, blazed every inch
of it with gold, precious stones, and paintings of priceless art; the
principal contrast to its radiance being the dirt of its masters, whose
bare legs, corded waists, and coarse brown serge never changed by night
or day, proclaimed amid their corporate wealth their personal vows of
poverty. He found them less pleasant to meet and look at than the
country people of their suburb on festa-days, with the Indulgences that
gave them the right to make merry stuck in their hats like
turnpike-tickets. He did not think the peasant girls in general
good-looking, though they carried themselves daintily and walked
remarkably well: but the ugliness of the old women, begotten of hard
work and a burning sun, with porters' knots of coarse grey hair grubbed
up over wrinkled and cadaverous faces, he thought quite stupendous. He
was never in a street a hundred yards long without getting up perfectly
the witch part of _Macbeth_.
With the theatres of course he soon became acquainted, and of that of
the puppets he wrote to me again and again with humorous rapture. "There
are other things," he added, after giving me the account which is
published in his book, "too solemnly surprising to dwell upon. They must
be seen. They must be seen. The enchanter carrying off the bride is not
greater than his men brandishing fiery torches and dropping their
lighted spirits of wine at every shake. Also the enchanter himself,
when, hunted down and overcome, he leaps into the rolling sea, and finds
a watery grave. Also the second comic man, aged about 55 and like
George the Third in the face, when he gives out the play for the next
night. They must all be seen. They can't be told about. Quite
impossible." The living performers he did not think so good, a disbelief
in Italian actors having been always a heresy with him, and the
deplorable length of dialogue to the small amount of action in their
plays making them sadly tiresome. The first that he saw at the principal
theatre was a version of Balzac's _Pere Goriot_. "The domestic Lear I
thought at first was going to be very clever. But he was too
pitiful--perhaps the Italian reality would be. He was immensely
applauded, though." He afterwards saw a version of Dumas' preposterous
play of _Kean_, in which most of the representatives of English actors
wore red hats with steeple crowns, and very loose blouses with broad
belts and buckles round their waists. "There was a mysterious person
called the Prince of Var-lees" (Wales), "the youngest and slimmest man
in the company, whose badinage in Kean's dressing-room was irresistible;
and the dresser wore top-boots, a Greek skull-cap, a black velvet
jacket, and leather breeches. One or two of the actors looked very hard
at me to see how I was touched by these English peculiarities--especially
when Kean kissed his male friends on both cheeks." The arrangements of
the house, which he described as larger than Drury-lane, he thought
excellent. Instead of a ticket for the private box he had taken on the
first tier, he received the usual key for admission which let him in as
if he lived there; and for the whole set-out, "quite as comfortable and
private as a box at our opera," paid only eight and fourpence English.
The opera itself had not its regular performers until after Christmas,
but in the summer there was a good comic company, and he saw the
_Scaramuccia_ and the _Barber of Seville_ brightly and pleasantly done.
There was also a day theatre, beginning at half past four in the
afternoon; but beyond the novelty of looking on at the covered stage as
he sat in the fresh pleasant air, he did not find much amusement in the
Goldoni comedy put before him. There came later a Russian circus, which
the unusual rains of that summer prematurely extinguished.
The Religious Houses he made early and many enquiries about, and there
was one that had stirred and baffled his curiosity much before he
discovered what it really was. All that was visible from the street was
a great high wall, apparently quite alone, no thicker than a party wall,
with grated windows, to which iron screens gave farther protection. At
first he supposed there had been a fire; but by degrees came to know
that on the other side were galleries, one above another, one above
another, and nuns always pacing them to and fro. Like the wall of a
racket-ground outside, it was inside a very large nunnery; and let the
poor sisters walk never so much, neither they nor the passers-by could
see anything of each other. It was close upon the Acqua Sola, too; a
little park with still young but very pretty trees, and fresh and
cheerful fountains, which the Genoese made their Sunday promenade; and
underneath which was an archway with great public tanks, where, at all
ordinary times, washerwomen were washing away, thirty or forty together.
At Albaro they were worse off in this matter: the clothes there being
washed in a pond, beaten with gourds, and whitened with a preparation of
lime: "so that," he wrote to me (24th of August), "what between the
beating and the burning they fall into holes unexpectedly, and my white
trowsers, after six weeks' washing, would make very good fishing-nets.
It is such a serious damage that when we get into the Peschiere we mean
to wash at home."
Exactly a fortnight before this date, he had hired rooms in the
Peschiere from the first of the following October; and so ended the
house-hunting for his winter residence, that had taken him so often to
the city. The Peschiere was the largest palace in Genoa let on hire, and
had the advantage of standing on a height aloof from the town,
surrounded by its own gardens. The rooms taken had been occupied by an
English colonel, the remainder of whose term was let to Dickens for 500
francs a month (L20); and a few days after (20th of August) he described
to me a fellow tenant: "A Spanish duke has taken the room under me in
the Peschiere. The duchess was his mistress many years, and bore him (I
think) six daughters. He always promised her that if she gave birth to a
son, he would marry her; and when at last the boy arrived, he went into
her bedroom, saying--'Duchess, I am charmed to "salute you!"' And he
married her in good earnest, and legitimatized (as by the Spanish law he
could) all the other children." The beauty of the new abode will justify
a little description when he takes up his quarters there. One or two
incidents may be related, meanwhile, of the closing weeks of his
residence at Albaro.
In the middle of August he dined with the French consul-general, and
there will now be no impropriety in printing his agreeable sketch of the
dinner. "There was present, among other Genoese, the Marquis di Negri: a
very fat and much older Jerdan, with the same thickness of speech and
size of tongue. He was Byron's friend, keeps open house here, writes
poetry, improvises, and is a very good old Blunderbore; just the sort of
instrument to make an artesian well with, anywhere. Well, sir, after
dinner, the consul proposed my health, with a little French conceit to
the effect that I had come to Italy to have personal experience of its
lovely climate, and that there was this similarity between the Italian
sun and its visitor, that the sun shone into the darkest places and made
them bright and happy with its benignant influence, and that my books
had done the like with the breasts of men, and so forth. Upon which
Blunderbore gives his bright-buttoned blue coat a great rap on the
breast, turns up his fishy eye, stretches out his arm like the living
statue defying the lightning at Astley's, and delivers four impromptu
verses in my honour, at which everybody is enchanted, and I more than
anybody--perhaps with the best reason, for I didn't understand a word of
them. The consul then takes from his breast a roll of paper, and says,
'I shall read them!' Blunderbore then says, 'Don't!' But the consul
does, and Blunderbore beats time to the music of the verse with his
knuckles on the table; and perpetually ducks forward to look round the
cap of a lady sitting between himself and me, to see what I think of
them. I exhibit lively emotion. The verses are in French--short line--on
the taking of Tangiers by the Prince de Joinville; and are received
with great applause; especially by a nobleman present who is reported to
be unable to read and write. They end in my mind (rapidly translating
them into prose) thus,--
'The cannon of France Rendering thanks
Shake the foundation To Heaven.
Of the wondering sea, The King
The artillery on the shore And all the Royal Family
Is put to silence. Are bathed
Honour to Joinville In tears.
And the Brave! They call upon the name
The Great Intelligence Of Joinville!
Is borne France also
Upon the wings of Fame Weeps, and echoes it.
To Paris. Joinville is crowned
Her national citizens With Immortality;
Exchange caresses And Peace and Joinville,
In the streets! And the Glory of France,
The temples are crowded Diffuse themselves
With religious patriots Conjointly.'
If you can figure to yourself the choice absurdity of receiving anything
into one's mind in this way, you can imagine the labour I underwent in
my attempts to keep the lower part of my face square, and to lift up one
eye gently, as with admiring attention. But I am bound to add that this
is really pretty literal; for I read them afterwards."
This, too, was the year of other uncomfortable glories of France in the
last three years of her Orleans dynasty; among them the Tahiti business,
as politicians may remember; and so hot became rumours of war with
England at the opening of September that Dickens had serious thoughts of
at once striking his tent. One of his letters was filled with the
conflicting doubts in which they lived for nigh a fortnight, every day's
arrival contradicting the arrival of the day before: so that, as he told
me, you met a man in the street to-day, who told you there would
certainly be war in a week; and you met the same man in the street
to-morrow, and he swore he always knew there would be nothing but peace;
and you met him again the day after, and he said it all depended _now_
on something perfectly new and unheard of before, which somebody else
said had just come to the knowledge of some consul in some dispatch
which said something about some telegraph which had been at work
somewhere, signalizing some prodigious intelligence. However, it all
passed harmlessly away, leaving him undisturbed opportunity to avail
himself of a pleasure that arose out of the consul-general's dinner
party, and to be present at a great reception given shortly after by the
good "old Blunderbore" just mentioned, on the occasion of his daughter's
birthday.
The Marquis had a splendid house, but Dickens found the grounds so
carved into grottoes and fanciful walks as to remind him of nothing so
much as our old White-conduit-house, except that he would have been well
pleased, on the present occasion, to have discovered a waiter crying,
"Give your orders, gents!" it being not easy to him at any time to keep
up, the whole night through, on ices and variegated lamps merely. But
the scene for awhile was amusing enough, and not rendered less so by the
delight of the Marquis himself, "who was constantly diving out into dark
corners and then among the lattice-work and flower pots, rubbing his
hands and going round and round with explosive chuckles in his huge
satisfaction with the entertainment." With horror it occurred to
Dickens, however, that four more hours of this kind of entertainment
would be too much; that the Genoa gates closed at twelve; and that as
the carriage had not been ordered till the dancing was expected to be
over and the gates to reopen, he must make a sudden bolt if he would
himself get back to Albaro. "I had barely time," he told me, "to reach
the gate before midnight; and was running as hard as I could go,
down-hill, over uneven ground, along a new street called the strada
Sevra, when I came to a pole fastened straight across the street, nearly
breast high, without any light or watchman--quite in the Italian style.
I went over it, headlong, with such force that I rolled myself
completely white in the dust; but although I tore my clothes to shreds,
I hardly scratched myself except in one place on the knee. I had no time
to think of it then, for I was up directly and off again to save the
gate: but when I got outside the wall, and saw the state I was in, I
wondered I had not broken my neck. I 'took it easy' after this, and
walked home, by lonely ways enough, without meeting a single soul. But
there is nothing to be feared, I believe, from midnight walks in this
part of Italy. In other places you incur the danger of being stabbed by
mistake; whereas the people here are quiet and good tempered, and very
rarely commit any outrage."
Such adventures, nevertheless, are seldom without consequences, and
there followed in this case a short but sharp attack of illness. It came
on with the old "unspeakable and agonizing pain in the side," for which
Bob Fagin had prepared and applied the hot bottles in the old warehouse
time; and it yielded quickly to powerful remedies. But for a few days he
had to content himself with the minor sights of Albaro. He sat daily in
the shade of the ruined chapel on the seashore. He looked in at the
festa in the small country church, consisting mainly of a tenor singer,
a seraphine, and four priests sitting gaping in a row on one side of the
altar "in flowered satin dresses and little cloth caps, looking exactly
like the band at a wild-beast-caravan." He was interested in the
wine-making, and in seeing the country tenants preparing their annual
presents for their landlords, of baskets of grapes and other fruit
prettily dressed with flowers. The season of the grapes, too, brought
out after dusk strong parties of rats to eat them as they ripened, and
so many shooting parties of peasants to get rid of these despoilers,
that as he first listened to the uproar of the firing and the echoes he
half fancied it a siege of Albaro. The flies mustered strong, too, and
the mosquitos;[85] so that at night he had to lie covered up with gauze,
like cold meat in a safe.
Of course all news from England, and especially visits paid him by
English friends who might be travelling in Italy, were a great delight.
This was the year when O'Connell was released from prison by the
judgment of the Lords on appeal. "I have no faith in O'Connell taking
the great position he might upon this: being beleaguered by vanity
always. Denman delights me. I am glad to think I have always liked him
so well. I am sure that whenever he makes a mistake, it _is_ a mistake;
and that no man lives who has a grander and nobler scorn of every mean
and dastard action. I would to Heaven it were decorous to pay him some
public tribute of respect . . . O'Connell's speeches are the old thing:
fretty, boastful, frothy, waspish at the voices in the crowd, and all
that: but with no true greatness. . . . What a relief to turn to that noble
letter of Carlyle's" (in which a timely testimony had been borne to the
truthfulness and honour of Mazzini), "which I think above all praise. My
love to him." Among his English visitors were Mr. Tagart's family, on
their way from a scientific congress at Milan; and Peter (now become
Lord) Robertson from Rome, of whose talk he wrote very pleasantly. The
sons of Burns had been entertained during the summer in Edinburgh at
what was called a Burns Festival, of which, through Jerrold who was
present, I had sent him no very favourable account; and this was now
confirmed by Robertson, whose letters had given him an "awful" narrative
of Wilson's speech, and of the whole business. "There was one man who
spoke a quarter of an hour or so, to the toast of the navy; and could
say nothing more than 'the--British--navy--always appreciates--' which
remarkable sentiment he repeated over and over again for that space of
time; and then sat down. Robertson told me also that Wilson's allusion
to, or I should rather say expatiation upon, the 'vices' of Burns,
excited but one sentiment of indignation and disgust: and added, very
sensibly, 'By God!--I want to know _what Burns did_! I never heard of
his doing anything that need be strange or unaccountable to the
Professor's mind. I think he must have mistaken the name, and fancied it
a dinner to the sons of _Burke_'--meaning of course the murderer. In
short he fully confirmed Jerrold in all respects." The same letter told
me, too, something of his reading. Jerrold's _Story of a Feather_ he had
derived much enjoyment from. "Gauntwolf's sickness and the career of
that snuffbox, masterly.[86] I have been deep in Voyages and Travels,
and in De Foe. Tennyson I have also been reading, again and again. What
a great creature he is! . . . What about the _Goldsmith_? Apropos, I am all
eagerness to write a story about the length of that most delightful of
all stories, the _Vicar of Wakefield_."
In the second week of September he went to meet his brother Frederick at
Marseilles, and bring him back over the Cornice road to pass a
fortnight's holiday at Genoa; and his description of the first inn upon
the Alps they slept in is too good to be lost. "We lay last night," he
wrote (9th of September) "at the first halting-place on this journey,
in an inn which is not entitled, as it ought to be, The house of call
for fleas and vermin in general, but is entitled the grand hotel of the
Post! I hardly know what to compare it to. It seemed something like a
house in Somers-town originally built for a wine-vaults and never
finished, but grown very old. There was nothing to eat in it and nothing
to drink. They had lost the teapot; and when they found it, they
couldn't make out what had become of the lid, which, turning up at last
and being fixed on to the teapot, couldn't be got off again for the
pouring in of more water. Fleas of elephantine dimensions were
gambolling boldly in the dirty beds; and the mosquitoes!--But let me
here draw a curtain (as I would have done if there had been any). We had
scarcely any sleep, and rose up with hands and arms hardly human."
In four days they were at Albaro, and the morning after their arrival
Dickens underwent the terrible shock of seeing his brother very nearly
drowned in the bay. He swam out into too strong a current,[87] and was
only narrowly saved by the accident of a fishing-boat preparing to leave
the harbour at the time. "It was a world of horror and anguish," Dickens
wrote to me, "crowded into four or five minutes of dreadful agitation;
and, to complete the terror of it, Georgy, Charlotte" (the nurse), "and
the children were on a rock in full view of it all, crying, as you may
suppose, like mad creatures." His own bathing was from the rock, and, as
he had already told me, of the most primitive kind. He went in whenever
he pleased, broke his head against sharp stones if he went in with that
end foremost, floundered about till he was all over bruises, and then
climbed and staggered out again. "Everybody wears a dress. Mine
extremely theatrical: Masaniello to the life: shall be preserved for
your inspection in Devonshire-terrace." I will add another personal
touch, also Masaniello-like, which marks the beginning of a change
which, though confined for the present to his foreign residence and
removed when he came to England, was resumed somewhat later, and in a
few more years wholly altered the aspect of his face. "The moustaches
are glorious, glorious. I have cut them shorter, and trimmed them a
little at the ends to improve the shape. They are charming, charming.
Without them, life would be a blank."
FOOTNOTES:
[78] He regretted one chance missed by his eccentric friend, which he
described to me just before he left Italy. "I saw last night an old
palazzo of the Doria, six miles from here, upon the sea, which De la Rue
urged Fletcher to take for us, when he was bent on that detestable villa
Bagnerello; which villa the Genoese have hired, time out of mind, for
one-fourth of what I paid, as they told him again and again before he
made the agreement. This is one of the strangest old palaces in Italy,
surrounded by beautiful _woods_ of great trees (an immense rarity here)
some miles in extent: and has upon the terrace a high tower, formerly a
prison for offenders against the family, and a defence against the
pirates. The present Doria lets it as it stands for L40 English--for the
year. . . . And the grounds are no expense; being proudly maintained by the
Doria, who spends this rent, when he gets it, in repairing the roof and
windows. It is a wonderful house; full of the most unaccountable
pictures and most incredible furniture: every room in it like the most
quaint and fanciful of Cattermole's pictures; and how many rooms I am
afraid to say." 2nd of June, 1845.
[79] "We have had a London sky until to-day," he wrote on the 20th of
July, "gray and cloudy as you please: but I am most disappointed, I
think, in the evenings, which are as commonplace as need be; for there
is no twilight, and as to the stars giving more light here than
elsewhere, that is humbug." The summer of 1844 seems to have been,
however, an unusually stormy and wet season. He wrote to me on the 21st
of October that they had had, so far, only four really clear days since
they came to Italy.
[80] "My faith on that-point is decidedly shaken, which reminds me to
ask you whether you ever read Simond's Tour in Italy. It is a most
charming book, and eminently remarkable for its excellent sense, and
determination not to give in to conventional lies." In a later letter he
says: "None of the books are unaffected and true but Simond's, which
charms me more and more by its boldness, and its frank exhibition of
that rare and admirable quality which enables a man to form opinions for
himself without a miserable and slavish reference to the pretended
opinions of other people. His notices of the leading pictures enchant
me. They are so perfectly just and faithful, and so whimsically shrewd."
Rome, 9th of March, 1845.
[81] I send my heart up to thee, all my heart
In this my singing!
For the stars help me, and the sea bears part;
The very night is clinging
Closer to Venice' streets to leave one space
Above me, whence thy face
May light my joyous heart to thee its dwelling-place.
Written to express Maclise's subject in the Academy catalogue.
[82] "Their house is next to ours on the right, with vineyard between;
but the place is so oddly contrived that one has to go a full mile round
to get to their door."
[83] Not however, happily for them, in another important particular, for
on the eve of their return to England she declared her intention of
staying behind and marrying an Italian. "She will have to go to
Florence, I find" (12th of May 1845), "to be married in Lord Holland's
house: and even then is only married according to the English law:
having no legal rights from such a marriage, either in France or Italy.
The man hasn't a penny. If there were an opening for a nice clean
restaurant in Genoa--which I don't believe there is, for the Genoese
have a natural enjoyment of dirt, garlic, and oil--it would still be a
very hazardous venture; as the priests will certainly damage the man, if
they can, for marrying a Protestant woman. However, the utmost I can do
is to take care, if such a crisis should arrive, that she shall not want
the means of getting home to England. As my father would observe, she
has sown and must reap."
[84] He had carried with him, I may here mention, letters of
introduction to residents in all parts of Italy, of which I believe he
delivered hardly one. Writing to me a couple of months before he left
the country he congratulated himself on this fact. "We are living very
quietly; and I am now more than ever glad that I have kept myself aloof
from the 'receiving' natives always, and delivered scarcely any of my
letters of introduction. If I had, I should have seen nothing and known
less. I have observed that the English women who have married foreigners
are invariably the most audacious in the license they assume. Think of
one lady married to a royal chamberlain (not here) who said at dinner to
the master of the house at a place where I was dining--that she had
brought back his _Satirist_, but didn't think there was quite so much
'fun' in it as there used to be. I looked at the paper afterwards, and
found it crammed with such vile obscenity as positively made one's hair
stand on end."
[85] What his poor little dog suffered should not be omitted from the
troubles of the master who was so fond of him. "Timber has had every
hair upon his body cut off because of the fleas, and he looks like the
ghost of a drowned dog come out of a pond after a week or so. It is very
awful to see him slide into a room. He knows the change upon him, and is
always turning round and round to look for himself. I think he'll die of
grief." Three weeks later: "Timber's hair is growing again, so that you
can dimly perceive him to be a dog. The fleas only keep three of his
legs off the ground now, and he sometimes moves of his own accord
towards some place where they don't want to go." His improvement was
slow, but after this continuous.
[86] A characteristic message for Jerrold came in a later letter (12th
of May, 1845): "I wish you would suggest to Jerrold for me as a Caudle
subject (if he pursue that idea). 'Mr. Caudle has incidentally remarked
that the house-maid is good-looking.'"
[87] Of the dangers of the bay he had before written to me (10th of
August). "A monk was drowned here on Saturday evening. He was bathing
with two other monks, who bolted when he cried out that he was
sinking--in consequence, I suppose, of his certainty of going to
Heaven."
CHAPTER VI.
WORK IN GENOA: PALAZZO PESCHIERE.
1844.
Palace of the Fish-ponds--Mural
Paintings--Peschiere Garden--A Peal of
Chimes--Governor's Levee--_Chimes_ a Plea for
the Poor--Dickens's Choice of a Hero--Religious
Sentiment--Dialogue in a Vision--Hard at
Work--First Outline of the _Chimes_--What the
Writing of it cost Him--Wild Weather--Coming to
London--Secret of the Visit--The Tale
finished--Proposed Travel.
IN the last week of September they moved from Albaro into Genoa, amid a
violent storm of wind and wet, "great guns blowing," the lightning
incessant, and the rain driving down in a dense thick cloud. But the
worst of the storm was over when they reached the Peschiere. As they
passed into it along the stately old terraces, flanked on either side
with antique sculptured figures, all the seven fountains were playing in
its gardens, and the sun was shining brightly on its groves of camellias
and orange-trees.
It was a wonderful place, and I soon became familiar with the several
rooms that were to form their home for the rest of their stay in Italy.
In the centre was the grand sala, fifty feet high, of an area larger
than "the dining-room of the Academy," and painted, walls and ceiling,
with frescoes three hundred years old, "as fresh as if the colours had
been laid on yesterday." On the same floor as this great hall were a
drawing-room, and a dining-room,[88] both covered also with frescoes
still bright enough to make them thoroughly cheerful, and both so nicely
proportioned as to give to their bigness all the effect of snugness.[89]
Out of these opened three other chambers that were turned into
sleeping-rooms and nurseries. Adjoining the sala, right and left, were
the two best bedrooms; "in size and shape like those at Windsor-castle
but greatly higher;" both having altars, a range of three windows with
stone balconies, floors tesselated in patterns of black and white stone,
and walls painted every inch: on the left, nymphs pursued by satyrs "as
large as life and as wicked;" on the right, "Phaeton larger than life,
with horses bigger than Meux and Co.'s, tumbling headlong down into the
best bed." The right-hand one he occupied with his wife, and of the left
took possession as a study; writing behind a big screen he had lugged
into it, and placed by one of the windows, from which he could see over
the city, as he wrote, as far as the lighthouse in its harbour. Distant
little over a mile as the crow flew, flashing five times in four
minutes, and on dark nights, as if by magic, illuminating brightly the
whole palace-front every time it shone, this lighthouse was one of the
wonders of Genoa.
[Illustration]
When it had all become more familiar to him, he was fond of dilating on
its beauties; and even the dreary sound of the chaunting from
neighbouring mass-performances, as it floated in at all the open
windows, which at first was a sad trouble, came to have its charm for
him. I remember a vivid account he gave me of a great festa on the hill
behind the house, when the people alternately danced under tents in the
open air and rushed to say a prayer or two in an adjoining church bright
with red and gold and blue and silver; so many minutes of dancing, and
of praying, in regular turns of each. But the view over into Genoa, on
clear bright days, was a never failing enjoyment. The whole city then,
without an atom of smoke, and with every possible variety of tower and
steeple pointing up into the sky, lay stretched out below his windows.
To the right and left were lofty hills, with every indentation in their
rugged sides sharply discernible; and on one side of the harbour
stretched away into the dim bright distance the whole of the Cornice,
its first highest range of mountains hoary with snow. Sitting down one
Spring day to write to me, he thus spoke of the sea and of the garden.
"Beyond the town is the wide expanse of the Mediterranean, as blue, at
this moment, as the most pure and vivid prussian blue on Mac's palette
when it is newly set; and on the horizon there is a red flush, seen
nowhere as it is here. Immediately below the windows are the gardens of
the house, with gold fish swimming and diving in the fountains; and
below them, at the foot of a steep slope, the public garden and drive,
where the walks are marked out by hedges of pink roses, which blush and
shine through the green trees and vines, close up to the balconies of
these windows. No custom can impair, and no description enhance, the
beauty of the scene."
All these and other glories and beauties, however, did not come to him
at once. They counted for little indeed when he first set himself
seriously to write. "Never did I stagger so upon a threshold before. I
seem as if I had plucked myself out of my proper soil when I left
Devonshire-terrace; and could take root no more until I return to it. . . .
Did I tell you how many fountains we have here? No matter. If they
played nectar, they wouldn't please me half so well as the West
Middlesex water-works at Devonshire-terrace." The subject for his new
Christmas story he had chosen, but he had not found a title for it, or
the machinery to work it with; when, at the moment of what seemed to be
his greatest trouble, both reliefs came. Sitting down one morning
resolute for work, though against the grain, his hand being out and
everything inviting to idleness, such a peal of chimes arose from the
city as he found to be "maddening." All Genoa lay beneath him, and up
from it, with some sudden set of the wind, came in one fell sound the
clang and clash of all its steeples, pouring into his ears, again and
again, in a tuneless, grating, discordant, jerking, hideous vibration
that made his ideas "spin round and round till they lost themselves in a
whirl of vexation and giddiness, and dropped down dead." He had never
before so suffered, nor did he again; but this was his description to me
next day, and his excuse for having failed in a promise to send me his
title. Only two days later, however, came a letter in which not a
syllable was written but "We have heard THE CHIMES at midnight, Master
Shallow!" and I knew he had discovered what he wanted.
Other difficulties were still to be got over. He craved for the London
streets. He so missed his long night-walks before beginning anything
that he seemed, as he said, dumbfounded without them. "I can't help
thinking of the boy in the school-class whose button was cut off by
Walter Scott and his friends. Put me down on Waterloo-bridge at eight
o'clock in the evening, with leave to roam about as long as I like, and
I would come home, as you know, panting to go on. I am sadly strange as
it is, and can't settle. You will have lots of hasty notes from me while
I am at work; but you know your man; and whatever strikes me, I shall
let off upon you as if I were in Devonshire-terrace. It's a great thing
to have my title, and see my way how to work the bells. Let them clash
upon me now from all the churches and convents in Genoa, I see nothing
but the old London belfry I have set them in. In my mind's eye, Horatio.
I like more and more my notion of making, in this little book, a great
blow for the poor. Something powerful, I think I can do, but I want to
be tender too, and cheerful; as like the _Carol_ in that respect as may
be, and as unlike it as such a thing can be. The duration of the action
will resemble it a little, but I trust to the novelty of the machinery
to carry that off; and if my design be anything at all, it has a grip
upon the very throat of the time." (8th of October.)
Thus bent upon his work, for which he never had been in more earnest
mood, he was disturbed by hearing that he must attend the levee of the
Governor who had unexpectedly arrived in the city, and who would take it
as an affront, his eccentric friend Fletcher told him, if that courtesy
were not immediately paid. "It was the morning on which I was going to
begin, so I wrote round to our consul,"--praying, of course, that excuse
should be made for him. Don't bother yourself, replied that sensible
functionary, for all the consuls and governors alive; but shut yourself
up by all means. "So," continues Dickens, telling me the tale, "he went
next morning in great state and full costume, to present two English
gentlemen. 'Where's the great poet?' said the Governor. 'I want to see
the great poet.' 'The great poet, your excellency,' said the consul, 'is
at work, writing a book, and begged me to make his excuses.' 'Excuses!'
said the Governor, 'I wouldn't interfere with such an occupation for all
the world. Pray tell him that my house is open to the honour of his
presence when it is perfectly convenient for him; but not otherwise.
And let no gentleman,' said the Governor, a surweyin' of his suite
with a majestic eye, 'call upon Signor Dickens till he is understood
to be disengaged.' And he sent somebody with his own cards next day.
Now I _do_ seriously call this, real politeness and pleasant
consideration--not positively American, but still gentlemanly and
polished. The same spirit pervades the inferior departments; and I have
not been required to observe the usual police regulations, or to put
myself to the slightest trouble about anything." (18th of October.)
The picture I am now to give of him at work should be prefaced by a word
or two that may throw light on the design he was working at. It was a
large theme for so small an instrument; and the disproportion was not
more characteristic of the man, than the throes of suffering and passion
to be presently undergone by him for results that many men would smile
at. He was bent, as he says, on striking a blow for the poor. They had
always been his clients, they had never been forgotten in any of his
books, but here nothing else was to be remembered. He had become, in
short, terribly earnest in the matter. Several months before he left
England, I had noticed in him the habit of more gravely regarding many
things before passed lightly enough; the hopelessness of any true
solution of either political or social problems by the ordinary
Downing-street methods had been startlingly impressed on him in
Carlyle's writings; and in the parliamentary talk of that day he had
come to have as little faith for the putting down of any serious evil,
as in a then notorious city Alderman's gabble for the putting down of
suicide. The latter had stirred his indignation to its depths just
before he came to Italy, and his increased opportunities of solitary
reflection since had strengthened and extended it. When he came
therefore to think of his new story for Christmas time, he resolved to
make it a plea for the poor. He did not want it to resemble his _Carol_,
but the same kind of moral was in his mind. He was to try and convert
Society, as he had converted Scrooge, by showing that its happiness
rested on the same foundations as those of the individual, which are
mercy and charity not less than justice. Whether right or wrong in these
assumptions, need not be questioned here, where facts are merely stated
to render intelligible what will follow; he had not made politics at any
time a study, and they were always an instinct with him rather than a
science; but the instinct was wholesome and sound, and to set class
against class never ceased to be as odious to him as he thought it
righteous at all times to help each to a kindlier knowledge of the
other. And so, here in Italy, amid the grand surroundings of this
Palazzo Peschiere, the hero of his imagination was to be a sorry old
drudge of a London ticket-porter, who in his anxiety not to distrust or
think hardly of the rich, has fallen into the opposite extreme of
distrusting the poor. From such distrust it is the object of the story
to reclaim him; and, to the writer of it, the tale became itself of less
moment than what he thus intended it to enforce. Far beyond mere vanity
in authorship went the passionate zeal with which he began, and the
exultation with which he finished, this task. When we met at its close,
he was fresh from Venice, which had impressed him as "the wonder" and
"the new sensation" of the world: but well do I remember how high above
it all arose the hope that filled his mind. "Ah!" he said to me, "when I
saw those places, how I thought that to leave one's hand upon the time,
lastingly upon the time, with one tender touch for the mass of toiling
people that nothing could obliterate, would be to lift oneself above the
dust of all the Doges in their graves, and stand upon a giant's
staircase that Sampson couldn't overthrow!" In varying forms this
ambition was in all his life.
Another incident of these days will exhibit aspirations of a more solemn
import that were not less part of his nature. It was depth of sentiment
rather than clearness of faith which kept safe the belief on which they
rested against all doubt or question of its sacredness, but every year
seemed to strengthen it in him. This was told me in his second letter
after reaching the Peschiere; the first having sent me some such
commissions in regard to his wife's family as his kindly care for all
connected with him frequently led to. "Let me tell you," he wrote (30th
of September), "of a curious dream I had, last Monday night; and of the
fragments of reality I can collect; which helped to make it up. I have
had a return of rheumatism in my back, and knotted round my waist like a
girdle of pain; and had laid awake nearly all that night under the
infliction, when I fell asleep and dreamed this dream. Observe that
throughout I was as real, animated, and full of passion as Macready (God
bless him!) in the last scene of _Macbeth_. In an indistinct place,
which was quite sublime in its indistinctness, I was visited by a
Spirit. I could not make out the face, nor do I recollect that I desired
to do so. It wore a blue drapery, as the Madonna might in a picture by
Raphael; and bore no resemblance to any one I have known except in
stature. I think (but I am not sure) that I recognized the voice.
Anyway, I knew it was poor Mary's spirit. I was not at all afraid, but
in a great delight, so that I wept very much, and stretching out my arms
to it called it 'Dear.' At this, I thought it recoiled; and I felt
immediately, that not being of my gross nature, I ought not to have
addressed it so familiarly. 'Forgive me!' I said. 'We poor living
creatures are only able to express ourselves by looks and words. I have
used the word most natural to _our_ affections; and you know my heart.'
It was so full of compassion and sorrow for me--which I knew
spiritually, for, as I have said, I didn't perceive its emotions by its
face--that it cut me to the heart; and I said, sobbing, 'Oh! give me
some token that you have really visited me!' 'Form a wish,' it said. I
thought, reasoning with myself: 'If I form a selfish wish, it will
vanish.' So I hastily discarded such hopes and anxieties of my own as
came into my mind, and said, 'Mrs. Hogarth is surrounded with great
distresses'--observe, I never thought of saying 'your mother' as to a
mortal creature--'will you extricate her?' 'Yes.' 'And her extrication
is to be a certainty to me, that this has really happened?' 'Yes.' 'But
answer me one other question!' I said, in an agony of entreaty lest it
should leave me. 'What is the True religion?' As it paused a moment
without replying, I said--Good God in such an agony of haste, lest it
should go away!--'You think, as I do, that the Form of religion does not
so greatly matter, if we try to do good? or,' I said, observing that it
still hesitated, and was moved with the greatest compassion for me,
'perhaps the Roman Catholic is the best? perhaps it makes one think of
God oftener, and believe in him more steadily?' 'For _you_,' said the
Spirit, full of such heavenly tenderness for me, that I felt as if my
heart would break; 'for _you_, it is the best!' Then I awoke, with the
tears running down my face, and myself in exactly the condition of the
dream. It was just dawn. I called up Kate, and repeated it three or four
times over, that I might not unconsciously make it plainer or stronger
afterwards. It was exactly this. Free from all hurry, nonsense, or
confusion, whatever. Now, the strings I can gather up, leading to this,
were three. The first you know, from the main subject of my last letter.
The second was, that there is a great altar in our bed-room, at which
some family who once inhabited this palace had mass performed in old
time: and I had observed within myself, before going to bed, that there
was a mark in the wall, above the sanctuary, where a religious picture
used to be; and I had wondered within myself what the subject might have
been, _and what the face was like_. Thirdly, I had been listening to the
convent bells (which ring at intervals in the night), and so had
thought, no doubt, of Roman Catholic services. And yet, for all this,
put the case of that wish being fulfilled by any agency in which I had
no hand; and I wonder whether I should regard it as a dream, or an
actual Vision!" It was perhaps natural that he should omit, from his own
considerations awakened by the dream, the very first that would have
risen in any mind to which his was intimately known--that it strengthens
other evidences, of which there are many in his life, of his not having
escaped those trying regions of reflection which most men of thought and
all men of genius have at some time to pass through. In such disturbing
fancies during the next year or two, I may add that the book which
helped him most was the _Life of Arnold_. "I respect and reverence his
memory," he wrote to me in the middle of October, in reply to my mention
of what had most attracted myself in it, "beyond all expression. I must
have that book. Every sentence that you quote from it is the text-book
of my faith."
He kept his promise that I should hear from him while writing, and I had
frequent letters when he was fairly in his work. "With my steam very
much up, I find it a great trial to be so far off from you, and
consequently to have no one (always excepting Kate and Georgy) to whom
to expatiate on my day's work. And I want a crowded street to plunge
into at night. And I want to be 'on the spot' as it were. But apart from
such things, the life I lead is favourable to work." In his next letter:
"I am in regular, ferocious excitement with the _Chimes_; get up at
seven; have a cold bath before breakfast; and blaze away, wrathful and
red-hot, until three o'clock or so; when I usually knock off (unless it
rains) for the day . . . I am fierce to finish in a spirit bearing some
affinity to those of truth and mercy, and to shame the cruel and the
canting. I have not forgotten my catechism. 'Yes verily, and with God's
help, so I will!'"
Within a week he had completed his first part, or quarter. "I send you
to-day" (18th of October), "by mail, the first and longest of the four
divisions. This is great for the first week, which is usually up-hill. I
have kept a copy in shorthand in case of accidents. I hope to send you a
parcel every Monday until the whole is done. I do not wish to influence
you, but it has a great hold upon me, and has affected me, in the doing,
in divers strong ways, deeply, forcibly. To give you better means of
judgment I will sketch for you the general idea, but pray don't read it
until you have read this first part of the MS." I print it here. It is a
good illustration of his method in all his writing. His idea is in it so
thoroughly, that, by comparison with the tale as printed, we see the
strength of its mastery over his first design. Thus always, whether his
tale was to be written in one or in twenty numbers, his fancies
controlled him. He never, in any of his books, accomplished what he had
wholly preconceived, often as he attempted it. Few men of genius ever
did. Once at the sacred heat that opens regions beyond ordinary vision,
imagination has its own laws; and where characters are so real as to be
treated as existences, their creator himself cannot help them having
their own wills and ways. Fern the farm-labourer is not here, nor yet
his niece the little Lilian (at first called Jessie) who is to give to
the tale its most tragical scene; and there are intimations of poetic
fancy at the close of my sketch which the published story fell short of.
Altogether the comparison is worth observing.
"The general notion is this. That what happens to poor Trotty in the
first part, and what will happen to him in the second (when he takes the
letter to a punctual and a great man of business, who is balancing his
books and making up his accounts, and complacently expatiating on the
necessity of clearing off every liability and obligation, and turning
over a new leaf and starting fresh with the new year), so dispirits him,
who can't do this, that he comes to the conclusion that his class and
order have no business with a new year, and really are 'intruding.' And
though he will pluck up for an hour or so, at the christening (I think)
of a neighbour's child, that evening: still, when he goes home, Mr.
Filer's precepts will come into his mind, and he will say to himself,
'we are a long way past the proper average of children, and it has no
business to be born:' and will be wretched again. And going home, and
sitting there alone, he will take that newspaper out of his pocket, and
reading of the crimes and offences of the poor, especially of those whom
Alderman Cute is going to put down, will be quite confirmed in his
misgiving that they are bad; irredeemably bad. In this state of mind, he
will fancy that the Chimes are calling, to him; and saying to himself
'God help me. Let me go up to 'em. I feel as if I were going to die in
despair--of a broken heart; let me die among the bells that have been a
comfort to me!'--will grope his way up into the tower; and fall down in
a kind of swoon among them. Then the third quarter, or in other words
the beginning of the second half of the book, will open with the Goblin
part of the thing: the bells ringing, and innumerable spirits (the sound
or vibration of them) flitting and tearing in and out of the
church-steeple, and bearing all sorts of missions and commissions and
reminders and reproaches, and comfortable recollections and what not, to
all sorts of people and places. Some bearing scourges; and others
flowers, and birds, and music; and others pleasant faces in mirrors, and
others ugly ones: the bells haunting people in the night (especially the
last of the old year) according to their deeds. And the bells
themselves, who have a goblin likeness to humanity in the midst of their
proper shapes, and who shine in a light of their own, will say (the
Great Bell being the chief spokesman) Who is he that being of the poor
doubts the right of poor men to the inheritance which Time reserves for
them, and echoes an unmeaning cry against his fellows? Toby, all aghast,
will tell him it is he, and why it is. Then the spirits of the bells
will bear him through the air to various scenes, charged with this
trust: That they show him how the poor and wretched, at the worst--yes,
even in the crimes that aldermen put down, and he has thought so
horrible--have some deformed and hunchbacked goodness clinging to them;
and how they have their right and share in Time. Following out the
history of Meg the Bells will show her, that marriage broken off and all
friends dead, with an infant child; reduced so low, and made so
miserable, as to be brought at last to wander out at night. And in
Toby's sight, her father's, she will resolve to drown herself and the
child together. But before she goes down to the water, Toby will see how
she covers it with a part of her own wretched dress, and adjusts its
rags so as to make it pretty in its sleep, and hangs over it, and
smooths its little limbs, and loves it with the dearest love that God
ever gave to mortal creatures; and when she runs down to the water, Toby
will cry 'Oh spare her! Chimes, have mercy on her! Stop her!'--and the
bells will say, 'Why stop her? She is bad at heart--let the bad die.'
And Toby on his knees will beg and pray for mercy: and in the end the
bells will stop her, by their voices, just in time. Toby will see, too,
what great things the punctual man has left undone on the close of the
old year, and what accounts he has left unsettled: punctual as he is.
And he will see a great many things about Richard, once so near being
his son-in-law, and about a great many people. And the moral of it all
will be, that he has his portion in the new year no less than any other
man, and that the poor require a deal of beating out of shape before
their human shape is gone; that even in their frantic wickedness there
may be good in their hearts triumphantly asserting itself, though all
the aldermen alive say 'No,' as he has learnt from the agony of his own
child; and that the truth is Trustfulness in them, not doubt, nor
putting down, nor filing them away. And when at last a great sea rises,
and this sea of Time comes sweeping down, bearing the alderman and such
mudworms of the earth away to nothing, dashing them to fragments in its
fury--Toby will climb a rock and hear the bells (now faded from his
sight) pealing out upon the waters. And as he hears them, and looks
round for help, he will wake up and find himself with the newspaper
lying at his foot; and Meg sitting opposite to him at the table, making
up the ribbons for her wedding to-morrow; and the window open, that the
sound of the bells ringing the old year out and the new year in may
enter. They will just have broken out, joyfully; and Richard will dash
in to kiss Meg before Toby, and have the first kiss of the new year
(he'll get it too); and the neighbours will crowd round with good
wishes; and a band will strike up gaily (Toby knows a Drum in private);
and the altered circumstances, and the ringing of the bells, and the
jolly musick, will so transport the old fellow that he will lead off a
country dance forthwith in an entirely new step, consisting of his old
familiar trot. Then quoth the inimitable--Was it a dream of Toby's after
all? Or is Toby but a dream? and Meg a dream? and all a dream! In
reference to which, and the realities of which dreams are born, the
inimitable will be wiser than he can be now, writing for dear life, with
the post just going, and the brave C booted. . . . Ah how I hate myself, my
dear fellow, for this lame and halting outline of the Vision I have in
my mind. But it must go to you. . . . You will say what is best for the
frontispiece". . . .
With the second part or quarter, after a week's interval, came
announcement of the enlargement of his plan, by which he hoped better to
carry out the scheme of the story, and to get, for its following part,
an effect for his heroine that would increase the tragic interest. "I am
still in stout heart with the tale. I think it well-timed and a good
thought; and as you know I wouldn't say so to anybody else, I don't mind
saying freely thus much. It has great possession of me every moment in
the day; and drags me where it will. . . . If you only could have read it
all at once!--But you never would have done that, anyway, for I never
should have been able to keep it to myself; so that's nonsense. I hope
you'll like it. I would give a hundred pounds (and think it cheap) to
see you read it. . . . Never mind."
That was the first hint of an intention of which I was soon to hear
more; but meanwhile, after eight more days, the third part came, with
the scene from which he expected so much, and with a mention of what the
writing of it had cost him. "This book (whether in the Hajji Baba sense
or not I can't say, but certainly in the literal one) has made my face
white in a foreign land. My cheeks, which were beginning to fill out,
have sunk again; my eyes have grown immensely large; my hair is very
lank; and the head inside the hair is hot and giddy. Read the scene at
the end of the third part, twice. I wouldn't write it twice, for
something. . . . You will see that I have substituted the name of Lilian
for Jessie. It is prettier in sound, and suits my music better. I
mention this, lest you should wonder who and what I mean by that name.
To-morrow I shall begin afresh (starting the next part with a broad
grin, and ending it with the very soul of jollity and happiness); and I
hope to finish by next Monday at latest. Perhaps on Saturday. I hope you
will like the little book. Since I conceived, at the beginning of the
second part, what must happen in the third, I have undergone as much
sorrow and agitation as if the thing were real; and have wakened up with
it at night. I was obliged to lock myself in when I finished it
yesterday, for my face was swollen for the time to twice its proper
size, and was hugely ridiculous.". . . His letter ended abruptly. "I am
going for a long walk, to clear my head. I feel that I am very shakey
from work, and throw down my pen for the day. There! (That's where it
fell.)" A huge blot represented it, and, as Hamlet says, the rest was
silence.
Two days later, answering a letter from me that had reached in the
interval, he gave sprightlier account of himself, and described a happy
change in the weather. Up to this time, he protested, they had not had
more than four or five clear days. All the time he had been writing they
had been wild and stormy. "Wind, hail, rain, thunder and lightning.
To-day," just before he sent me his last manuscript, "has been November
slack-baked, the sirocco having come back; and to-night it blows great
guns with a raging storm." "Weather worse," he wrote after three
Mondays, "than any November English weather I have ever beheld, or any
weather I have had experience of anywhere. So horrible to-day that all
power has been rained and gloomed out of me. Yesterday, in pure
determination to get the better of it, I walked twelve miles in
mountain rain. You never saw it rain. Scotland and America are nothing
to it." But now all this was over. "The weather changed on Saturday
night, and has been glorious ever since. I am afraid to say more in its
favour, lest it should change again." It did not. I think there were no
more complainings. I heard now of autumn days with the mountain wind
lovely, enjoyable, exquisite past expression. I heard of mountain walks
behind the Peschiere, most beautiful and fresh, among which, and along
the beds of dry rivers and torrents, he could "pelt away," in any dress,
without encountering a soul but the contadini. I heard of his starting
off one day after finishing work, "fifteen miles to dinner--oh my stars!
at such an inn!!!" On another day, of a party to dinner at their
pleasant little banker's at Quinto six miles off, to which, while the
ladies drove, he was able "to walk in the sun of the middle of the day
and to walk home again at night." On another, of an expedition up the
mountain on mules. And on another of a memorable tavern-dinner with
their merchant friend Mr. Curry, in which there were such successions of
surprising dishes of genuine native cookery that they took two hours in
the serving, but of the component parts of not one of which was he able
to form the remotest conception: the site of the tavern being on the
city wall, its name in Italian sounding very romantic and meaning "the
Whistle," and its bill of fare kept for an experiment to which, before
another month should be over, he dared and challenged my cookery in
Lincoln's-inn.
A visit from him to London was to be expected almost immediately! That
all remonstrance would be idle, under the restless excitement his work
had awakened, I well knew. It was not merely the wish he had, natural
enough, to see the last proofs and the woodcuts before the day of
publication, which he could not otherwise do; but it was the stronger
and more eager wish, before that final launch, to have a vivider sense
than letters could give him of the effect of what he had been doing. "If
I come, I shall put up at Cuttris's" (then the Piazza-hotel in
Covent-garden) "that I may be close to you. Don't say to anybody, except
our immediate friends, that I am coming. Then I shall not be bothered.
If I should preserve my present fierce writing humour, in any pass I may
run to Venice, Bologna, and Florence, before I turn my face towards
Lincoln's-inn-fields; and come to England by Milan and Turin. But this
of course depends in a great measure on your reply." My reply, dwelling
on the fatigue and cost, had the reception I foresaw. "Notwithstanding
what you say, I am still in the same mind about coming to London. Not
because the proofs concern me at all (I should be an ass as well as a
thankless vagabond if they did), but because of that unspeakable
restless something which would render it almost as impossible for me to
remain here and not see the thing complete, as it would be for a full
balloon, left to itself, not to go up. I do not intend coming from
_here_, but by way of Milan and Turin (previously going to Venice), and
so, across the wildest pass of the Alps that may be open, to
Strasburg. . . . As you dislike the Young England gentleman I shall knock
him out, and replace him by a man (I can dash him in at your rooms in an
hour) who recognizes no virtue in anything but the good old times, and
talks of them, parrot-like, whatever the matter is. A real good old city
tory, in a blue coat and bright buttons and a white cravat, and with a
tendency of blood to the head. File away at Filer, as you please; but
bear in mind that the _Westminster Review_ considered Scrooge's
presentation of the turkey to Bob Cratchit as grossly incompatible with
political economy. I don't care at all for the skittle-playing." These
were among things I had objected to.
But the close of his letter revealed more than its opening of the
reason, not at once so frankly confessed, for the long winter-journey he
was about to make; and if it be thought that, in printing the passage, I
take a liberty with my friend, it will be found that equal liberty is
taken with myself, whom it goodnaturedly caricatures; so that the reader
can enjoy his laugh at either or both. "Shall I confess to you, I
particularly want Carlyle above all to see it before the rest of the
world, when it is done; and I should like to inflict the little story on
him and on dear old gallant Macready with my own lips, and to have
Stanny and the other Mac sitting by. Now, if you was a real gent, you'd
get up a little circle for me, one wet evening, when I come to town: and
would say, 'My boy (SIR, will you have the goodness to leave those books
alone and to go downstairs--WHAT the Devil are you doing! And mind, sir,
I can see nobody--do you hear? Nobody. I am particularly engaged with a
gentleman from Asia)--My boy, would you give us that little Christmas
book (a little Christmas book of Dickens's, Macready, which I'm anxious
you should hear); and don't slur it, now, or be too fast, Dickens,
please!'--I say, if you was a real gent, something to this effect might
happen. I shall be under sailing orders the moment I have finished. And
I shall produce myself (please God) in London on the very day you name.
For one week: to the hour."
The wish was complied with, of course; and that night in
Lincoln's-inn-fields led to rather memorable issues. His next letter
told me the little tale was done. "Third of November, 1844. Half-past
two, afternoon. Thank God! I have finished the _Chimes_. This moment. I
take up my pen again to-day; to say only that much; and to add that I
have had what women call 'a real good cry!'" Very genuine all this, it
is hardly necessary to say. The little book thus completed was not one
of his greater successes, and it raised him up some objectors; but there
was that in it which more than repaid the suffering its writing cost
him, and the enmity its opinions provoked; and in his own heart it had a
cherished corner to the last. The intensity of it seemed always best to
represent to himself what he hoped to be longest remembered for; and
exactly what he felt as to this, his friend Jeffrey warmly expressed.
"All the tribe of selfishness, and cowardice and cant, will hate you in
their hearts, and cavil when they can; will accuse you of wicked
exaggeration, and excitement to discontent, and what they pleasantly
call disaffection! But never mind. The good and the brave are with you,
and the truth also."
He resumed his letter on the fourth of November. "Here is the brave
courier measuring bits of maps with a carving-fork, and going up
mountains on a teaspoon. He and I start on Wednesday for Parma, Modena,
Bologna, Venice, Verona, Brescia, and Milan. Milan being within a
reasonable journey from here, Kate and Georgy will come to meet me when
I arrive there on my way towards England; and will bring me all letters
from you. I shall be there on the 18th. . . . Now, you know my
punctiwality. Frost, ice, flooded rivers, steamers, horses, passports,
and custom-houses may damage it. But my design is, to walk into
Cuttris's coffee-room on Sunday the 1st of December, in good time for
dinner. I shall look for you at the farther table by the fire--where we
generally go. . . . But the party for the night following? I know you have
consented to the party. Let me see. Don't have any one, this particular
night, to dinner, but let it be a summons for the special purpose at
half-past 6. Carlyle, indispensable, and I should like his wife of all
things: _her_ judgment would be invaluable. You will ask Mac, and why
not his sister? Stanny and Jerrold I should particularly wish; Edwin
Landseer; Blanchard; perhaps Harness; and what say you to Fonblanque and
Fox? I leave it to you. You know the effect I want to try . . . Think the
_Chimes_ a letter, my dear fellow, and forgive this. I will not fail to
write to you on my travels. Most probably from Venice. And when I meet
you (in sound health I hope) oh Heaven! what a week we will have."
FOOTNOTES:
[88] "Into which we might put your large room--I wish we could!--away in
one corner, and dine without knowing it."
[89] "Very vast you will say, and very dreary; but it is not so really.
The paintings are so fresh, and the proportions so agreeable to the eye,
that the effect is not only cheerful but snug. . . . We are a little
incommoded by applications from strangers to go over the interior. The
paintings were designed by Michael Angelo, and have a great
reputation. . . . Certain of these frescoes were reported officially to the
Fine Art Commissioners by Wilson as the best in Italy . . . I allowed a
party of priests to be shown the great hall yesterday . . . It is in
perfect repair, and the doors almost shut--which is quite a miraculous
circumstance. I wish you could see it, my dear F. Gracious Heavens! if
you could only _come back_ with me, wouldn't I soon flash on your
astonished sight." (6th of October.)
CHAPTER VII.
ITALIAN TRAVEL.
1844.
Cities and People--Venice--Proposed Travel--At
Lodi--Paintings--The Inns--Dinner at the
Peschiere--Custom-house Officers--At Milan--At
Strasburg--Return to London--A Macready
Rehearsal--Friendly Americans.
SO it all fell out accordingly. He parted from his disconsolate wife, as
he told me in his first letter from Ferrara, on Wednesday the 6th of
November: left her shut up in her palace like a baron's lady in the time
of the crusades; and had his first real experience of the wonders of
Italy. He saw Parma, Modena, Bologna, Ferrara, Venice, Verona, and
Mantua. As to all which the impressions conveyed to me in his letters
have been more or less given in his published _Pictures_. They are
charmingly expressed. There is a sketch of a cicerone at Bologna which
will remain in his books among their many delightful examples of his
unerring and loving perception for every gentle, heavenly, and tender
soul, under whatever conventional disguise it wanders here on earth,
whether as poorhouse orphan or lawyer's clerk, architect's pupil at
Salisbury or cheerful little guide to graves at Bologna; and there is
another memorable description in his Rembrandt sketch, in form of a
dream, of the silent, unearthly, watery wonders of Venice. This last,
though not written until after his London visit, had been prefigured so
vividly in what he wrote at once from the spot, that those passages from
his letter[90] may be read still with a quite undiminished interest. "I
must not," he said, "anticipate myself. But, my dear fellow, nothing in
the world that ever you have heard of Venice, is equal to the
magnificent and stupendous reality. The wildest visions of the Arabian
Nights are nothing to the piazza of Saint Mark, and the first impression
of the inside of the church. The gorgeous and wonderful reality of
Venice is beyond the fancy of the wildest dreamer. Opium couldn't build
such a place, and enchantment couldn't shadow it forth in a vision. All
that I have heard of it, read of it in truth or fiction, fancied of it,
is left thousands of miles behind. You know that I am liable to
disappointment in such things from over-expectation, but Venice is
above, beyond, out of all reach of coming near, the imagination of a
man. It has never been rated high enough. It is a thing you would shed
tears to see. When I came _on board_ here last night (after a five
miles' row in a gondola; which somehow or other, I wasn't at all
prepared for); when, from seeing the city lying, one light, upon the
distant water, like a ship, I came plashing through the silent and
deserted streets; I felt as if the houses were reality--the water,
fever-madness. But when, in the bright, cold, bracing day, I stood upon
the piazza, this morning, by Heaven the glory of the place was
insupportable! And diving down from that into its wickedness and
gloom--its awful prisons, deep below the water; its judgment chambers,
secret doors, deadly nooks, where the torches you carry with you blink
as if they couldn't bear the air in which the frightful scenes were
acted; and coming out again into the radiant, unsubstantial Magic of the
town; and diving in again, into vast churches, and old tombs--a new
sensation, a new memory, a new mind came upon me. Venice is a bit of my
brain from this time. My dear Forster, if you could share my transports
(as you would if you were here) what would I not give! I feel cruel not
to have brought Kate and Georgy; positively cruel and base. Canaletti
and Stanny, miraculous in their truth. Turner, very noble. But the
reality itself, beyond all pen or pencil. I never saw the thing before
that I should be afraid to describe. But to tell what Venice is, I feel
to be an impossibility. And here I sit alone, writing it: with nothing
to urge me on, or goad me to that estimate, which, speaking of it to
anyone I loved, and being spoken to in return, would lead me to form. In
the sober solitude of a famous inn; with the great bell of Saint Mark
ringing twelve at my elbow; with three arched windows in my room (two
stories high) looking down upon the grand canal and away, beyond, to
where the sun went down to-night in a blaze; and thinking over again
those silent speaking faces of Titian and Tintoretto; I swear (uncooled
by any humbug I have seen) that Venice is _the_ wonder and the new
sensation of the world! If you could be set down in it, never having
heard of it, it would still be so. With your foot upon its stones, its
pictures before you, and its history in your mind, it is something past
all writing of or speaking of--almost past all thinking of. You couldn't
talk to me in this room, nor I to you, without shaking hands and saying
'Good God my dear fellow, have we lived to see this!'"
Five days later, Sunday the 17th, he was at Lodi, from which he wrote to
me that he had been, like Leigh Hunt's pig, up "all manner of streets"
since he left his palazzo; that with one exception he had not on any
night given up more than five hours to rest; that all the days except
two had been bad ("the last two foggy as Blackfriars-bridge on Lord
Mayor's day"); and that the cold had been dismal. But what cheerful,
keen, observant eyes he carried everywhere; and, in the midst of new and
unaccustomed scenes, and of objects and remains of art for which no
previous study had prepared him, with what a delicate play of
imagination and fancy the minuteness and accuracy of his ordinary
vision was exalted and refined; I think strikingly shown by the few
unstudied passages I am preserving from these friendly letters. He saw
everything for himself; and from mistakes in judging for himself which
not all the learning and study in the world will save ordinary men, the
intuition of genius almost always saved him. Hence there is hardly
anything uttered by him, of this much-trodden and wearisomely-visited,
but eternally beautiful and interesting country, that will not be found
worth listening to.
"I am already brim-full of cant about pictures, and shall be happy to
enlighten you on the subject of the different schools, at any length you
please. It seems to me that the preposterous exaggeration in which our
countrymen delight in reference to this Italy, hardly extends to the
really good things.[91] Perhaps it is in its nature, that there it
should fall short. I have never seen any praise of Titian's great
picture of the Transfiguration of the Virgin at Venice, which soared
half as high as the beautiful and amazing reality. It is perfection.
Tintoretto's picture too, of the Assembly of the Blest, at Venice also,
with all the lines in it (it is of immense size and the figures are
countless) tending majestically and dutifully to Almighty God in the
centre, is grand and noble in the extreme. There are some wonderful
portraits there, besides; and some confused, and hurried, and
slaughterous battle pieces, in which the surprising art that presents
the generals to your eye, so that it is almost impossible you can miss
them in a crowd though they are in the thick of it, is very pleasant to
dwell upon. I have seen some delightful pictures; and some (at Verona
and Mantua) really too absurd and ridiculous even to laugh at.
Hampton-court is a fool to 'em--and oh there are some rum 'uns there, my
friend. Some werry rum 'uns. . . . Two things are clear to me already. One
is, that the rules of art are much too slavishly followed; making it a
pain to you, when you go into galleries day after day, to be so very
precisely sure where this figure will be turning round, and that figure
will be lying down, and that other will have a great lot of drapery
twined about him, and so forth. This becomes a perfect nightmare. The
second is, that these great men, who were of necessity very much in the
hands of the monks and priests, painted monks and priests a vast deal
too often. I constantly see, in pictures of tremendous power, heads
quite below the story and the painter; and I invariably observe that
those heads are of the convent stamp, and have their counterparts,
exactly, in the convent inmates of this hour. I see the portraits of
monks I know at Genoa, in all the lame parts of strong paintings: so I
have settled with myself that in such cases the lameness was not with
the painter, but with the vanity and ignorance of his employers, who
_would_ be apostles on canvas at all events."[92]
In the same letter he described the Inns. "It is a great thing--quite a
matter of course--with English travellers, to decry the Italian inns. Of
course you have no comforts that you are used to in England; and
travelling alone, you dine in your bedroom always. Which is opposed to
our habits. But they are immeasurably better than you would suppose. The
attendants are very quick; very punctual; and so obliging, if you speak
to them politely, that you would be a beast not to look cheerful, and
take everything pleasantly. I am writing this in a room like a room on
the two-pair front of an unfinished house in Eaton-square: the very
walls make me feel as if I were a bricklayer distinguished by Mr. Cubitt
with the favour of having it to take care of. The windows won't open,
and the doors won't shut; and these latter (a cat could get in, between
them and the floor) have a windy command of a colonnade which is open to
the night, so that my slippers positively blow off my feet, and make
little circuits in the room--like leaves. There is a very ashy
wood-fire, burning on an immense hearth which has no fender (there is no
such thing in Italy); and it only knows two extremes--an agony of heat
when wood is put on, and an agony of cold when it has been on two
minutes. There is also an uncomfortable stain in the wall, where the
fifth door (not being strictly indispensable) was walled up a year or
two ago, and never painted over. But the bed is clean; and I have had an
excellent dinner; and without being obsequious or servile, which is not
at all the characteristic of the people in the North of Italy, the
waiters are so amiably disposed to invent little attentions which they
suppose to be English, and are so lighthearted and goodnatured, that it
is a pleasure to have to do with them. But so it is with all the people.
Vetturino-travelling involves a stoppage of two hours in the middle of
the day, to bait the horses. At that time I always walk on. If there are
many turns in the road, I necessarily have to ask my way, very often:
and the men are such gentlemen, and the women such ladies, that it is
quite an interchange of courtesies."
Of the help his courier continued to be to him I had whimsical instances
in almost every letter, but he appears too often in the published book
to require such celebration here. He is however an essential figure to
two little scenes sketched for me at Lodi, and I may preface them by
saying that Louis Roche, a native of Avignon, justified to the close his
master's high opinion. He was again engaged for nearly a year in
Switzerland, and soon after, poor fellow, though with a jovial
robustness of look and breadth of chest that promised unusual length of
days, was killed by heart-disease. "The brave C continues to be a
prodigy. He puts out my clothes at every inn as if I were going to stay
there twelve months; calls me to the instant every morning; lights the
fire before I get up; gets hold of roast fowls and produces them in
coaches at a distance from all other help, in hungry moments; and is
invaluable to me. He is such a good fellow, too, that little rewards
don't spoil him. I always give him, after I have dined, a tumbler of
Sauterne or Hermitage or whatever I may have; sometimes (as yesterday)
when we have come to a public-house at about eleven o'clock, very cold,
having started before day-break and had nothing, I make him take his
breakfast with me; and this renders him only more anxious than ever, by
redoubling attentions, to show me that he thinks he has got a good
master . . . I didn't tell you that the day before I left Genoa, we had a
dinner-party--our English consul and his wife; the banker; Sir George
Crawford and his wife; the De la Rues; Mr. Curry; and some others,
fourteen in all. At about nine in the morning, two men in immense paper
caps enquired at the door for the brave C, who presently introduced them
in triumph as the Governor's cooks, his private friends, who had come to
dress the dinner! Jane wouldn't stand this, however; so we were obliged
to decline. Then there came, at half-hourly intervals, six gentlemen
having the appearance of English clergymen; other private friends who
had come to wait. . . . We accepted _their_ services; and you never saw
anything so nicely and quietly done. He had asked, as a special
distinction, to be allowed the supreme control of the dessert; and he
had ices made like fruit, had pieces of crockery turned upside down so
as to look like other pieces of crockery non-existent in this part of
Europe, and carried a case of tooth-picks in his pocket. Then his
delight was, to get behind Kate at one end of the table, to look at me
at the other, and to say to Georgy in a low voice whenever he handed her
anything, 'What does master think of datter 'rangement? Is he
content?'. . . If you could see what these fellows of couriers are when
their families are not upon the move, you would feel what a prize he is.
I can't make out whether he was ever a smuggler, but nothing will induce
him to give the custom-house-officers anything: in consequence of which
that portmanteau of mine has been unnecessarily opened twenty times.
Two of them will come to the coach-door, at the gate of a town. 'Is
there anything contraband in this carriage, signore?'--'No, no. There's
nothing here. I am an Englishman, and this is my servant.' 'A buono mano
signore?' 'Roche,'(in English) 'give him something, and get rid of him.'
He sits unmoved. 'A buono mano signore?' 'Go along with you!' says the
brave C. 'Signore, I am a custom-house-officer!' 'Well, then, more shame
for you!'--he always makes the same answer. And then he turns to me and
says in English: while the custom-house-officer's face is a portrait of
anguish framed in the coach-window, from his intense desire to know what
is being told to his disparagement: 'Datter chip,' shaking his fist at
him, 'is greatest tief--and you know it you rascal--as never did en-razh
me so, that I cannot bear myself!' I suppose chip to mean chap, but it
may include the custom-house-officer's father and have some reference to
the old block, for anything I distinctly know."
He closed his Lodi letter next day at Milan, whither his wife and her
sister had made an eighty miles journey from Genoa, to pass a couple of
days with him in Prospero's old Dukedom before he left for London. "We
shall go our several ways on Thursday morning, and I am still bent on
appearing at Cuttris's on Sunday the first, as if I had walked thither
from Devonshire-terrace. In the meantime I shall not write to you again
. . . to enhance the pleasure (if anything _can_ enhance the pleasure) of
our meeting . . . I am opening my arms so wide!" One more letter I had
nevertheless; written at Strasburg on Monday night the 25th; to tell me
I might look for him one day earlier, so rapid had been his progress. He
had been in bed only once, at Friburg for two or three hours, since he
left Milan; and he had sledged through the snow on the top of the
Simplon in the midst of prodigious cold. "I am sitting here _in_ a
wood-fire, and drinking brandy and water scalding hot, with a faint idea
of coming warm in time. My face is at present tingling with the frost
and wind, as I suppose the cymbals may, when that turbaned turk attached
to the life guards' band has been newly clashing at them in St.
James's-park. I am in hopes it may be the preliminary agony of returning
animation."
[Illustration: AT 58 LINCOLN'S-INN-FIELDS, MONDAY THE 2^{ND} OF DECEMBER
1844.]
There was certainly no want of animation when we met. I have but to
write the words to bring back the eager face and figure, as they flashed
upon me so suddenly this wintry Saturday night that almost before I
could be conscious of his presence I felt the grasp of his hand. It is
almost all I find it possible to remember of the brief, bright, meeting.
Hardly did he seem to have come when he was gone. But all that the visit
proposed he accomplished. He saw his little book in its final form for
publication; and, to a select few brought together on Monday the 2nd of
December at my house, had the opportunity of reading it aloud. An
occasion rather memorable, in which was the germ of those readings to
larger audiences by which, as much as by his books, the world knew him
in his later life; but of which no detail beyond the fact remains in my
memory, and all are now dead who were present at it excepting only Mr.
Carlyle and myself. Among those however who have thus passed away was
one, our excellent Maclise, who, anticipating the advice of Captain
Cuttle, had "made a note of" it in pencil, which I am able here to
reproduce. It will tell the reader all he can wish to know. He will see
of whom the party consisted; and may be assured (with allowance for a
touch of caricature to which I may claim to be considered myself as the
chief victim), that in the grave attention of Carlyle, the eager
interest of Stanfield and Maclise, the keen look of poor Laman
Blanchard, Fox's rapt solemnity, Jerrold's skyward gaze, and the tears
of Harness and Dyce, the characteristic points of the scene are
sufficiently rendered. All other recollection of it is passed and gone;
but that at least its principal actor was made glad and grateful,
sufficient farther testimony survives. Such was the report made of it,
that once more, on the pressing intercession of our friend Thomas
Ingoldsby (Mr. Barham), there was a second reading to which the presence
and enjoyment of Fonblanque gave new zest;[93] and when I expressed to
Dickens, after he left us, my grief that he had had so tempestuous a
journey for such brief enjoyment, he replied that the visit had been one
happiness and delight to him. "I would not recall an inch of the way to
or from you, if it had been twenty times as long and twenty thousand
times as wintry. It was worth any travel--anything! With the soil of the
road in the very grain of my cheeks, I swear I wouldn't have missed
that week, that first night of our meeting, that one evening of the
reading at your rooms, aye, and the second reading too, for any easily
stated or conceived consideration."
He wrote from Paris, at which he had stopped on his way back to see
Macready, whom an engagement to act there with Mr. Mitchell's English
company had prevented from joining us in Lincoln's-inn-fields. There had
been no such frost and snow since 1829, and he gave dismal report of the
city. With Macready he had gone two nights before to the Odeon to see
Alexandre Dumas' _Christine_ played by Madame St. George, "once
Napoleon's mistress; now of an immense size, from dropsy I suppose; and
with little weak legs which she can't stand upon. Her age, withal,
somewhere about 80 or 90. I never in my life beheld such a sight. Every
stage-conventionality she ever picked up (and she has them all) has got
the dropsy too, and is swollen and bloated hideously. The other actors
never looked at one another, but delivered all their dialogues to the
pit, in a manner so egregiously unnatural and preposterous that I
couldn't make up my mind whether to take it as a joke or an outrage."
And then came allusion to a project we had started on the night of the
reading, that a private play should be got up by us on his return from
Italy. "You and I, sir, will reform this altogether." He had but to wait
another night, however, when he saw it all reformed at the Italian opera
where Grisi was singing in _Il Pirato_, and "the passion and fire of a
scene between her, Mario, and Fornasari, was as good and great as it is
possible for anything operatic to be. They drew on one another, the two
men--not like stage-players, but like Macready himself: and she, rushing
in between them; now clinging to this one, now to that, now making a
sheath for their naked swords with her arms, now tearing her hair in
distraction as they broke away from her and plunged again at each other;
was prodigious." This was the theatre at which Macready was immediately
to act, and where Dickens saw him next day rehearse the scene before the
doge and council in _Othello_, "not as usual facing the float but
arranged on one side," with an effect that seemed to him to heighten the
reality of the scene.
He left Paris on the night of the 13th with the malle poste, which did
not reach Marseilles till fifteen hours behind its time, after three
days and three nights travelling over horrible roads. Then, in a
confusion between the two rival packets for Genoa, he unwillingly
detained one of them more than an hour from sailing; and only managed at
last to get to her just as she was moving out of harbour. As he went up
the side, he saw a strange sensation among the angry travellers whom he
had detained so long; heard a voice exclaim "I am blarmed if it ain't
DICKENS!" and stood in the centre of a group of _Five Americans_! But
the pleasantest part of the story is that they were, one and all, glad
to see him; that their chief man, or leader, who had met him in New
York, at once introduced them all round with the remark, "Personally our
countrymen, and you, can fix it friendly sir, I do expectuate;" and
that, through the stormy passage to Genoa which followed, they were
excellent friends. For the greater part of the time, it is true, Dickens
had to keep to his cabin; but he contrived to get enjoyment out of them
nevertheless. The member of the party who had the travelling dictionary
wouldn't part with it, though he was dead sick in the cabin next to my
friend's; and every now and then Dickens was conscious of his
fellow-travellers coming down to him, crying out in varied tones of
anxious bewilderment, "I say, what's French for a pillow?" "Is there any
Italian phrase for a lump of sugar? Just look, will you?" "What the
devil does echo mean? The garsong says echo to everything!" They were
excessively curious to know, too, the population of every little town on
the Cornice, and all its statistics; "perhaps the very last subjects
within the capacity of the human intellect," remarks Dickens, "that
would ever present themselves to an Italian steward's mind. He was a
very willing fellow, our steward; and, having some vague idea that they
would like a large number, said at hazard fifty thousand, ninety
thousand, four hundred thousand, when they asked about the population of
a place not larger than Lincoln's-inn-fields. And when they said _Non
Possible!_ (which was the leader's invariable reply), he doubled or
trebled the amount; to meet what he supposed to be their views, and make
it quite satisfactory."
FOOTNOTES:
[90] "I began this letter, my dear friend" (he wrote it from Venice on
Tuesday night the 12th of November), "with the intention of describing
my travels as I went on. But I have seen so much, and travelled so hard
(seldom dining, and being almost always up by candle light), that I must
reserve my crayons for the greater leisure of the Peschiere after we
have met, and I have again returned to it. As soon as I have fixed a
place in my mind, I bolt--at such strange seasons and at such unexpected
angles, that the brave C stares again. But in this way, and by insisting
on having everything shewn to me whether or no, and against all
precedents and orders of proceeding, I get on wonderfully." Two days
before he had written to me from Ferrara, after the very pretty
description of the vineyards between Piacenza and Parma which will be
found in the _Pictures from Italy_ (pp. 203-4): "If you want an antidote
to this, I may observe that I got up, this moment, to fasten the window;
and the street looked as like some byeway in Whitechapel--or--I look
again--like Wych Street, down by the little barber's shop on the same
side of the way as Holywell Street--or--I look again--as like Holywell
Street itself--as ever street was like to street, or ever will be, in
this world."
[91] Four months later, after he had seen the galleries at Rome and the
other great cities, he sent me a remark which has since had eloquent
reinforcement from critics of undeniable authority. "The most famous of
the oil paintings in the Vatican you know through the medium of the
finest line-engravings in the world; and as to some of them I much
doubt, if you had seen them with me, whether you might not think you had
lost little in having only known them hitherto in that translation.
Where the drawing is poor and meagre, or alloyed by time,--it is so, and
it must be, often; though no doubt it is a heresy to hint at such a
thing--the engraving presents the forms and the idea to you, in a simple
majesty which such defects impair. Where this is not the case, and all
is stately and harmonious, still it is somehow in the very grain and
nature of a delicate engraving to suggest to you (I think) the utmost
delicacy, finish, and refinement, as belonging to the original.
Therefore, though the Picture in this latter case will greatly charm and
interest you, it does not take you by surprise. You are quite prepared
beforehand for the fullest excellence of which it is capable." In the
same letter he wrote of what remained always a delight in his memory,
the charm of the more private collections. He found magnificent
portraits and paintings in the private palaces, where he thought them
seen to greater advantage than in galleries; because in numbers not so
large as to distract attention or confuse the eye. "There are portraits
innumerable by Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt and Vandyke; heads by Guido,
and Domenichino, and Carlo Dolci; subjects by Raphael, and Correggio,
and Murillo, and Paul Veronese, and Salvator; which it would be
difficult indeed to praise too highly, or to praise enough. It is a
happiness to me to think that they cannot be felt, as they should be
felt, by the profound connoisseurs who fall into fits upon the longest
notice and the most unreasonable terms. Such tenderness and grace, such
noble elevation, purity, and beauty, so shine upon me from some
well-remembered spots in the walls of these galleries, as to relieve my
tortured memory from legions of whining friars and waxy holy families. I
forgive, from the bottom of my soul, whole orchestras of earthy angels,
and whole groves of St. Sebastians stuck as full of arrows according to
pattern as a lying-in pincushion is stuck with pins. And I am in no
humour to quarrel even with that priestly infatuation, or priestly
doggedness of purpose, which persists in reducing every mystery of our
religion to some literal development in paint and canvas, equally
repugnant to the reason and the sentiment of any thinking man."
[92] The last two lines he has printed in the _Pictures_, p. 249,
"certain of" being inserted before "his employers."
[93] I find the evening mentioned in the diary which Mr. Barham's son
quotes in his Memoir. "December 5, 1844. Dined at Forster's with Charles
Dickens, Stanfield, Maclise, and Albany Fonblanque. Dickens read with
remarkable effect his Christmas story, the _Chimes_, from the
proofs. . . ." (ii. 191.)
CHAPTER VIII.
LAST MONTHS IN ITALY.
1845.
Jesuit Interferences--Travel Southward--Carrara
and Pisa--A Wild Journey--At Radicofani--A
Beggar and his Staff--At Rome--Terracina--Bay
of Naples--Lazzaroni--Sad English News--At
Florence--Visit to Landor's Villa--At Lord
Holland's--Return to Genoa--Italy's Best
Season--A Funeral--Nautical Incident--Fireflies
at Night--Returning by Switzerland--At
Lucerne--Passage of the St. Gothard--Splendour
of Swiss Scenery--Swiss Villages.
ON the 22nd of December he had resumed his ordinary Genoa life; and of a
letter from Jeffrey, to whom he had dedicated his little book, he wrote
as "most energetic and enthusiastic. Filer sticks in his throat rather,
but all the rest is quivering in his heart. He is very much struck by
the management of Lilian's story, and cannot help speaking of that;
writing of it all indeed with the freshness and ardour of youth, and not
like a man whose blue and yellow has turned grey." Some of its words
have been already given. "Miss Coutts has sent Charley, with the best of
letters to me, a Twelfth Cake weighing ninety pounds, magnificently
decorated; and only think of the characters, Fairburn's Twelfth Night
characters, being detained at the custom-house for Jesuitical
surveillance! But these fellows are---- Well! never mind. Perhaps you
have seen the history of the Dutch minister at Turin, and of the
spiriting away of his daughter by the Jesuits? It is all true; though,
like the history of our friend's servant,[94] almost incredible. But
their devilry is such that I am assured by our consul that if, while we
are in the south, we were to let our children go out with servants on
whom we could not implicitly rely, these holy men would trot even their
small feet into churches with a view to their ultimate conversion! It is
tremendous even to see them in the streets, or slinking about this
garden." Of his purpose to start for the south of Italy in the middle of
January, taking his wife with him, his letter the following week told
me; dwelling on all he had missed, in that first Italian Christmas, of
our old enjoyments of the season in England; and closing its pleasant
talk with a postscript at midnight. "First of January, 1845. Many many
many happy returns of the day! A life of happy years! The Baby is
dressed in thunder, lightning, rain, and wind. His birth is most
portentous here."
It was of ill-omen to me, one of its earliest incidents being my only
brother's death; but Dickens had a friend's true helpfulness in sorrow,
and a portion of what he then wrote to me I permit myself to preserve
in a note[95] for what it relates of his own sad experiences and solemn
beliefs and hopes. The journey southward began on the 20th January, and
five days later I had a letter written from La Scala, at a little inn,
"supported on low brick arches like a British haystack," the bed in
their room "like a mangle," the ceiling without lath or plaster, nothing
to speak of available for comfort or decency, and nothing particular to
eat or drink. "But for all this I have become attached to the country
and I don't care who knows it." They had left Pisa that morning and
Carrara the day before: at the latter place an ovation awaiting him, the
result of the zeal of our eccentric friend Fletcher, who happened to be
staying there with an English marble-merchant.[96] "There is a beautiful
little theatre there, built of marble; and they had it illuminated that
night, in my honour. There was really a very fair opera: but it is
curious that the chorus has been always, time out of mind, made up of
labourers in the quarries, who don't know a note of music, and sing
entirely by ear. It was crammed to excess, and I had a great reception;
a deputation waiting upon us in the box, and the orchestra turning out
in a body afterwards and serenading us at Mr. Walton's." Between this
and Rome they had a somewhat wild journey;[97] and before Radicofani was
reached, there were disturbing rumours of bandits and even uncomfortable
whispers as to their night's lodging-place. "I really began to think we
might have an adventure; and as I had brought (like an ass) a bag of
Napoleons with me from Genoa, I called up all the theatrical ways of
letting off pistols that I could call to mind, and was the more disposed
to fire them from not having any." It ended in no worse adventure,
however, than a somewhat exciting dialogue with an old professional
beggar at Radicofani itself, in which he was obliged to confess that he
came off second-best. It transpired at a little town hanging on a hill
side, of which the inhabitants, being all of them beggars, had the habit
of swooping down, like so many birds of prey, upon any carriage that
approached it.
"Can you imagine" (he named a first-rate bore, for whose name I shall
substitute) "M. F. G. in a very frowsy brown cloak concealing his whole
figure, and with very white hair and a very white beard, darting out of
this place with a long staff in his hand, and begging? There he was,
whether you can or not; out of breath with the rapidity of his dive, and
staying with his staff all the Radicofani boys, that he might fight it
out with me alone. It was very wet, and so was I: for I had kept,
according to custom, my box-seat. It was blowing so hard that I could
scarcely stand; and there was a custom-house on the spot, besides. Over
and above all this, I had no small money; and the brave C never has,
when I want it for a beggar. When I had excused myself several times, he
suddenly drew himself up and said, with a wizard look (fancy the
aggravation of M. F. G. as a wizard!) 'Do you know what you are doing,
my lord? Do you mean to go on, to-day?' 'Yes,' I said, 'I do.' 'My
lord,' he said, 'do you know that your vetturino is unacquainted with
this part of the country; that there is a wind raging on the mountain,
which will sweep you away; that the courier, the coach, and all the
passengers, were blown from the road last year; and that the danger is
great and almost certain?' 'No,' I said, 'I don't.' 'My lord, you don't
understand me, I think?' 'Yes I do, d---- you!' nettled by this (you
feel it? I confess it). 'Speak to my servant. It's his business. Not
mine'--for he really was too like M. F. G. to be borne. If you could
have seen him!--'Santa Maria, these English lords! It's not their
business, if they're killed! They leave it to their servants!' He drew
off the boys; whispered them to keep away from the heretic; and ran up
the hill again, almost as fast as he had come down. He stopped at a
little distance as we moved on; and pointing to Roche with his long
staff cried loudly after me, 'It's _his_ business if you're killed, is
it, my lord? Ha! ha! ha! whose business is it, when the English lords
are born! Ha! ha! ha!' The boys taking it up in a shrill yell, I left
the joke and them at this point. But I must confess that I thought he
had the best of it. And he had so far reason for what he urged, that
when we got on the mountain pass the wind became terrific, so that we
were obliged to take Kate out of the carriage lest she should be blown
over, carriage and all, and had ourselves to hang on to it, on the windy
side, to prevent its going Heaven knows where!"
The first impression of Rome was disappointing. It was the evening of
the 30th of January, and the cloudy sky, dull cold rain, and muddy
footways, he was prepared for; but he was not prepared for the long
streets of commonplace shops and houses like Paris or any other capital,
the busy people, the equipages, the ordinary walkers up and down. "It
was no more my Rome, degraded and fallen and lying asleep in the sun
among a heap of ruins, than Lincoln's-inn-fields is. So I really went to
bed in a very indifferent humour." That all this yielded to later and
worthier impressions I need hardly say; and he had never in his life, he
told me afterwards, been so moved or overcome by any sight as by that of
the Coliseum, "except perhaps by the first contemplation of the Falls of
Niagara." He went to Naples for the interval before the holy week; and
his first letter from it was to say that he had found the wonderful
aspects of Rome before he left, and that for loneliness and grandeur of
ruin nothing could transcend the southern side of the Campagna. But
farther and farther south the weather had become worse; and for a week
before his letter (the 11th of February), the only bright sky he had
seen was just as the sun was coming up across the sea at Terracina. "Of
which place, a beautiful one, you can get a very good idea by imagining
something as totally unlike the scenery in _Fra Diavolo_ as possible."
He thought the bay less striking at Naples than at Genoa, the shape of
the latter being more perfect in its beauty, and the smaller size
enabling you to see it all at once, and feel it more like an exquisite
picture. The city he conceived the greatest dislike to.[98] "The
condition of the common people here is abject and shocking. I am afraid
the conventional idea of the picturesque is associated with such misery
and degradation that a new picturesque will have to be established as
the world goes onward. Except Fondi, there is nothing on earth that I
have seen so dirty as Naples. I don't know what to liken the streets to
where the mass of the lazzaroni live. You recollect that favourite
pigstye of mine near Broadstairs? They are more like streets of such
apartments heaped up story on story, and tumbled house on house, than
anything else I can think of, at this moment." In a later letter he was
even less tolerant. "What would I give that you should see the lazzaroni
as they really are--mere squalid, abject, miserable animals for vermin
to batten on; slouching, slinking, ugly, shabby, scavenging scarecrows!
And oh the raffish counts and more than doubtful countesses, the noodles
and the blacklegs, the good society! And oh the miles of miserable
streets and wretched occupants,[99] to which Saffron-hill or the
Borough-mint is a kind of small gentility, which are found to be so
picturesque by English lords and ladies; to whom the wretchedness left
behind at home is lowest of the low, and vilest of the vile, and
commonest of all common things. Well! well! I have often thought that
one of the best chances of immortality for a writer is in the Death of
his language, when he immediately becomes good company; and I often
think here,--What _would_ you say to these people, milady and milord, if
they spoke out of the homely dictionary of your own 'lower orders.'" He
was again at Rome on Sunday the second of March.
Sad news from me as to a common and very dear friend awaited him there;
but it is a subject on which I may not dwell farther than to say that
there arose from it much to redeem even such a sorrow, and that this I
could not indicate better than by these wise and tender words from
Dickens. "No philosophy will bear these dreadful things, or make a
moment's head against them, but the practical one of doing all the good
we can, in thought and deed. While we can, God help us! ourselves stray
from ourselves so easily; and there are all around us such frightful
calamities besetting the world in which we live; nothing else will carry
us through it. . . . What a comfort to reflect on what you tell me. Bulwer
Lytton's conduct is that of a generous and noble-minded man, as I have
ever thought him. Our dear good Procter too! And Thackeray--how earnest
they have all been! I am very glad to find you making special mention of
Charles Lever. I am glad over every name you write. It says something
for our pursuit, in the midst of all its miserable disputes and
jealousies, that the common impulse of its followers, in such an
instance as this, is surely and certainly of the noblest."
After the ceremonies of the holy week, of which the descriptions sent to
me were reproduced in his book, he went to Florence,[100] which lived
always afterwards in his memory with Venice, and with Genoa. He thought
these the three great Italian cities. "There are some places
here,[101]--oh Heaven how fine! I wish you could see the tower of the
palazzo Vecchio as it lies before me at this moment, on the opposite
bank of the Arno! But I will tell you more about it, and about all
Florence, from my shady arm-chair up among the Peschiere oranges. I
shall not be sorry to sit down in it again. . . . Poor Hood, poor Hood! I
still look for his death, and he still lingers on. And Sydney Smith's
brother gone after poor dear Sydney himself! Maltby will wither when he
reads it; and poor old Rogers will contradict some young man at dinner,
every day for three weeks."
Before he left Florence (on the 4th of April) I heard of a "very
pleasant and very merry day" at Lord Holland's; and I ought to have
mentioned how much he was gratified, at Naples, by the attentions of the
English Minister there, Mr. Temple, Lord Palmerston's brother, whom he
described as a man supremely agreeable, with everything about him in
perfect taste, and with that truest gentleman-manner which has its root
in kindness and generosity of nature. He was back at home in the
Peschiere on Wednesday the ninth of April. Here he continued to write to
me every week, for as long as he remained, of whatever he had seen: with
no definite purpose as yet, but the pleasure of interchanging with
myself the impressions and emotions undergone by him. "Seriously," he
wrote to me on the 13th of April, "it is a great pleasure to me to find
that you are really pleased with these shadows in the water, and think
them worth the looking at. Writing at such odd places, and in such odd
seasons, I have been half savage with myself, very often, for not doing
better. But d'Orsay, from whom I had a charming letter three days since,
seems to think as you do of what he has read in those shown to him, and
says they remind him vividly of the real aspect of these scenes. . . .
Well, if we should determine, after we have sat in council, that the
experiences they relate are to be used, we will call B. and E. to their
share and voice in the matter." Shortly before he left, the subject was
again referred to (7th of June). "I am in as great doubt as you about
the letters I have written you with these Italian experiences. I cannot
for the life of me devise any plan of using them to my own satisfaction,
and yet think entirely with you that in some form I ought to use them."
Circumstances not in his contemplation at this time settled the form
they ultimately took.
Two more months were to finish his Italian holiday, and I do not think
he enjoyed any part of it so much as its close. He had formed a real
friendship for Genoa, was greatly attached to the social circle he had
drawn round him there, and liked rest after his travel all the more for
the little excitement of living its activities over again, week by week,
in these letters to me. And so, from his "shady arm-chair up among the
Peschiere oranges," I had at regular intervals what he called his
rambling talk; went over with him again all the roads he had taken; and
of the more important scenes and cities, such as Venice, Rome, and
Naples, received such rich filling-in to the first outlines sent, as
fairly justified the title of _Pictures_ finally chosen for them. The
weather all the time too had been without a flaw. "Since our return," he
wrote on the 27th April, "we have had charming spring days. The garden
is one grove of roses; we have left off fires; and we breakfast and dine
again in the great hall, with the windows open. To-day we have rain,
but rain was rather wanted I believe, so it gives offence to nobody. As
far as I have had an opportunity of judging yet, the spring is the most
delightful time in this country. But for all that I am looking with
eagerness to the tenth of June, impatient to renew our happy old walks
and old talks in dear old home."
Of incidents during these remaining weeks there were few, but such as he
mentioned had in them points of humour or character still worth
remembering.[102] Two men were hanged in the city; and two ladies of
quality, he told me, agreed to keep up for a time a prayer for the souls
of these two miserable creatures so incessant that Heaven should never
for a moment be left alone; to which end "they relieved each other"
after such wise, that, for the whole of the stated time, one of them was
always on her knees in the cathedral church of San Lorenzo. From which
he inferred that "a morbid sympathy for criminals is not wholly peculiar
to England, though it affects more people in that country perhaps than
in any other."
Of Italian usages to the dead some notices from his letters have been
given, and he had an example before he left of the way in which they
affected English residents. A gentleman of his friend Fletcher's
acquaintance living four miles from Genoa had the misfortune to lose his
wife; and no attendance on the dead beyond the city gate, nor even any
decent conveyance, being practicable, the mourner, to whom Fletcher had
promised nevertheless the sad satisfaction of an English funeral, which
he had meanwhile taken enormous secret pains to arrange with a small
Genoese upholsterer, was waited upon, on the appointed morning, by a
very bright yellow hackney-coach-and-pair driven by a coachman in yet
brighter scarlet knee-breeches and waistcoat, who wanted to put the
husband and the body inside together. "They were obliged to leave one of
the coach-doors open for the accommodation even of the coffin; the
widower walked beside the carriage to the Protestant cemetery; and
Fletcher followed on a big grey horse."[103]
Scarlet breeches reappear, not less characteristically, in what his next
letter told of a couple of English travellers who took possession at
this time (24th of May) of a portion of the ground floor of the
Peschiere. They had with them a meek English footman who immediately
confided to Dickens's servants, among other personal grievances, the
fact that he was made to do everything, even cooking, in crimson
breeches; which in a hot climate, he protested, was "a grinding of him
down." "He is a poor soft country fellow; and his master locks him up at
night, in a basement room with iron bars to the window. Between which
our servants poke wine in, at midnight. His master and mistress buy old
boxes at the curiosity shops, and pass their lives in lining 'em with
bits of parti-coloured velvet. A droll existence, is it not? We are
lucky to have had the palace to ourselves until now, but it is so large
that we never see or hear these people; and I should not have known
even, if they had not called upon us, that another portion of the ground
floor had been taken by some friends of old Lady Holland--whom I seem to
see again, crying about dear Sydney Smith, behind that green screen as
we last saw her together."[104]
Then came a little incident also characteristic. An English ship of war,
the Phantom, appeared in the harbour; and from her commander, Sir Henry
Nicholson, Dickens received, among attentions very pleasant to him, an
invitation to lunch on board and bring his wife, for whom, at a time
appointed, a boat was to be sent to the Ponte Reale (the royal bridge).
But no boat being there at the time, Dickens sent off his servant in
another boat to the ship to say he feared some mistake. "While we were
walking up and down a neighbouring piazza in his absence, a brilliant
fellow in a dark blue shirt with a white hem to it all round the collar,
regular corkscrew curls, and a face as brown as a berry, comes up to me
and says 'Beg your pardon sir--Mr. Dickens?' 'Yes.' 'Beg your pardon
sir, but I'm one of the ship's company of the Phantom sir, cox'en of the
cap'en's gig sir, she's a lying off the pint sir--been there half an
hour.' 'Well but my good fellow,' I said, 'you're at the wrong place!'
'Beg your pardon sir, I was afeerd it was the wrong place sir, but I've
asked them Genoese here sir, twenty times, if it was Port Real; and they
knows no more than a dead jackass!'--Isn't it a good thing to have made
a regular Portsmouth name of it?"
That was in his letter of the 1st June, which began by telling me it had
been twice begun and twice flung into the basket, so great was his
indisposition to write as the time for departure came; and which ended
thus. "The fire-flies at night now, are miraculously splendid; making
another firmament among the rocks on the seashore, and the vines inland.
They get into the bedrooms, and fly about, all night, like beautiful
little lamps.[105]. . . I have surrendered much I had fixed my heart
upon, as you know, admitting you have had reason for not coming to us
here: but I stand by the hope that you and Mac will come and meet us at
Brussels; it being so very easy. A day or two there, and at Antwerp,
would be very happy for us; and we could still dine in Lincoln's-inn-fields
on the day of arrival." I had been unable to join him in Genoa, urgently
as he had wished it: but what is said here was done, and Jerrold was
added to the party.
His last letter from Genoa was written on the 7th of June, not from the
Peschiere, but from a neighbouring palace, "Brignole Rosso," into which
he had fled from the miseries of moving. "They are all at sixes and
sevens up at the Peschiere, as you may suppose; and Roche is in a
condition of tremendous excitement, engaged in settling the inventory
with the house-agent, who has just told me he is the devil himself. I
had been appealed to, and had contented myself with this expression of
opinion. 'Signor Noli, you are an old impostor!' 'Illustrissimo,' said
Signor Noli in reply, 'your servant is the devil himself: sent on earth
to torture me.' I look occasionally towards the Peschiere (it is visible
from this room), expecting to see one of them flying out of a window.
Another great cause of commotion is, that they have been paving the lane
by which the house is approached, ever since we returned from Rome. We
have not been able to get the carriage up since that time, in
consequence; and unless they finish to-night, it can't be packed in the
garden, but the things will have to be brought down in baskets,
piecemeal, and packed in the street. To avoid this inconvenient
necessity, the Brave made proposals of bribery to the paviours last
night, and induced them to pledge themselves that the carriage should
come up at seven this evening. The manner of doing that sort of paving
work here, is to take a pick or two with an axe, and then lie down to
sleep for an hour. When I came out, the Brave had issued forth to
examine the ground; and was standing alone in the sun among a heap of
prostrate figures: with a Great Despair depicted in his face, which it
would be hard to surpass. It was like a picture--'After the
Battle'--Napoleon by the Brave: Bodies by the Paviours."
He came home by the Great St. Gothard, and was quite carried away by
what he saw of Switzerland. The country was so divine that he should
have wondered indeed if its sons and daughters had ever been other than
a patriotic people. Yet, infinitely above the country he had left as he
ranked it in its natural splendours, there was something more enchanting
than these that he lost in leaving Italy; and he expressed this
delightfully in the letter from Lucerne (14th of June) which closes the
narrative of his Italian life.
"We came over the St. Gothard, which has been open only eight days. The
road is cut through the snow, and the carriage winds along a narrow path
between two massive snow walls, twenty feet high or more. Vast plains of
snow range up the mountain-sides above the road, itself seven thousand
feet above the sea; and tremendous waterfalls, hewing out arches for
themselves in the vast drifts, go thundering down from precipices into
deep chasms, here and there and everywhere: the blue water tearing
through the white snow with an awful beauty that is most sublime. The
pass itself, the mere pass over the top, is not so fine, I think, as the
Simplon; and there is no plain upon the summit, for the moment it is
reached the descent begins. So that the loneliness and wildness of the
Simplon are not equalled _there_. But being much higher, the ascent and
the descent range over a much greater space of country; and on both
sides there are places of terrible grandeur, unsurpassable, I should
imagine, in the world. The Devil's Bridge, terrific! The whole descent
between Andermatt (where we slept on Friday night) and Altdorf, William
Tell's town, which we passed through yesterday afternoon, is the highest
sublimation of all you can imagine in the way of Swiss scenery. Oh God!
what a beautiful country it is! How poor and shrunken, beside it, is
Italy in its brightest aspect!
"I look upon the coming down from the Great St. Gothard with a carriage
and four horses and only one postilion, as the most dangerous thing that
a carriage and horses can do. We had two great wooden logs for drags,
and snapped them both like matches. The road is like a geometrical
staircase, with horrible depths beneath it; and at every turn it is a
toss-up, or seems to be, whether the leaders shall go round or over. The
lives of the whole party may depend upon a strap in the harness; and if
we broke our rotten harness once yesterday, we broke it at least a dozen
times. The difficulty of keeping the horses together in the continual
and steep circle, is immense. They slip and slide, and get their legs
over the traces, and are dragged up against the rocks; carriage, horses,
harness, all a confused heap. The Brave, and I, and the postilion, were
constantly at work, in extricating the whole concern from a tangle, like
a skein of thread. We broke two thick iron chains, and crushed the box
of a wheel, as it was; and the carriage is now undergoing repair, under
the window, on the margin of the lake: where a woman in short
petticoats, a stomacher, and two immensely long tails of black hair
hanging down her back very nearly to her heels, is looking
on--apparently dressed for a melodrama, but in reality a waitress at
this establishment.