SCENE I

SKETCHES AND STUDIES IN ITALY AND GREECE

BY JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

AUTHOR OF "RENAISSANCE IN ITALY" "STUDIES OF THE GREEK POETS," ETC

SECOND SERIES

LONDON JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.

1914

_All rights reserved_

FIRST EDITION (_Smith, Elder & Co._) _October, 1898_

_Reprinted_ _May, 1900_

_Reprinted_ _June, 1902_

_Reprinted_ _November, 1905_

_Reprinted_ _December, 1907_

_Reprinted_ _February, 1914_

_Taken over by John Murray_ _January, 1917_

_Printed in Great Britain at_ THE BALLANTYNE PRESS _by_ SPOTTISWOODE,

BALLANTYNE & Co. LTD. _Colchester, London & Eton_

CONTENTS

PAGE

RAVENNA 1

RIMINI 14

MAY IN UMBRIA 32

THE PALACE OF URBINO 50

VITTORIA ACCORAMBONI 88

AUTUMN WANDERINGS 127

PARMA 147

CANOSSA 163

FORNOVO 180

FLORENCE AND THE MEDICI 201

THE DEBT OF ENGLISH TO ITALIAN LITERATURE 258

POPULAR SONGS OF TUSCANY 276

POPULAR ITALIAN POETRY OF THE RENAISSANCE 305

THE 'ORFEO' OF POLIZIANO 345

EIGHT SONNETS OF PETRARCH 365

SKETCHES AND STUDIES IN ITALY AND GREECE

_RAVENNA_

The Emperor Augustus chose Ravenna for one of his two naval stations,

and in course of time a new city arose by the sea-shore, which

received the name of Portus Classis. Between this harbour and the

mother city a third town sprang up, and was called Cæsarea. Time and

neglect, the ravages of war, and the encroaching powers of Nature have

destroyed these settlements, and nothing now remains of the three

cities but Ravenna. It would seem that in classical times Ravenna

stood, like modern Venice, in the centre of a huge lagune, the fresh

waters of the Ronco and the Po mixing with the salt waves of the

Adriatic round its very walls. The houses of the city were built on

piles; canals instead of streets formed the means of communication,

and these were always filled with water artificially conducted from

the southern estuary of the Po. Round Ravenna extended a vast morass,

for the most part under shallow water, but rising at intervals into

low islands like the Lido or Murano or Torcello which surround Venice.

These islands were celebrated for their fertility: the vines and

fig-trees and pomegranates, springing from a fat and fruitful soil,

watered with constant moisture, and fostered by a mild sea-wind and

liberal sunshine, yielded crops that for luxuriance and quality

surpassed the harvests of any orchards on the mainland. All the

conditions of life in old Ravenna seem to have resembled those of

modern Venice; the people went about in gondolas, and in the early

morning barges laden with fresh fruit or meat and vegetables flocked

from all quarters to the city of the sea.[1] Water also had to be

procured from the neighbouring shore, for, as Martial says, a well at

Ravenna was more valuable than a vineyard. Again, between the city and

the mainland ran a long low causeway all across the lagune like that

on which the trains now glide into Venice. Strange to say, the air of

Ravenna was remarkably salubrious: this fact, and the ease of life

that prevailed there, and the security afforded by the situation of

the town, rendered it a most desirable retreat for the monarchs of

Italy during those troublous times in which the empire nodded to its

fall. Honorius retired to its lagunes for safety; Odoacer, who

dethroned the last Cæsar of the West, succeeded him; and was in turn,

supplanted by Theodoric the Ostrogoth. Ravenna, as we see it now,

recalls the peaceful and half-Roman rule of the great Gothic king. His

palace, his churches, and the mausoleums in which his daughter

Amalasuntha laid the hero's bones, have survived the sieges of

Belisarius and Astolphus, the conquest of Pepin, the bloody quarrels

of Iconoclasts with the children of the Roman Church, the mediæval

wars of Italy, the victory of Gaston de Foix, and still stand gorgeous

with marbles and mosaics in spite of time and the decay of all around

them.

As early as the sixth century, the sea had already retreated to such a

distance from Ravenna that orchards and gardens were cultivated on

the spot where once the galleys of the Cæsars rode at anchor. Groves

of pines sprang up along the shore, and in their lofty tops the music

of the wind moved like the ghost of waves and breakers plunging upon

distant sands. This Pinetum stretches along the shore of the Adriatic

for about forty miles, forming a belt of variable width between the

great marsh and the tumbling sea. From a distance the bare stems and

velvet crowns of the pine-trees stand up like palms that cover an

oasis on Arabian sands; but at a nearer view the trunks detach

themselves from an inferior forest-growth of juniper and thorn and ash

and oak, the tall roofs of the stately firs shooting their breadth of

sheltering greenery above the lower and less sturdy brushwood. It is

hardly possible to imagine a more beautiful and impressive scene than

that presented by these long alleys of imperial pines. They grow so

thickly one behind another, that we might compare them to the pipes of

a great organ, or the pillars of a Gothic church, or the basaltic

columns of the Giant's Causeway. Their tops are evergreen and laden

with the heavy cones, from which Ravenna draws considerable wealth.

Scores of peasants are quartered on the outskirts of the forest, whose

business it is to scale the pines and rob them of their fruit at

certain seasons of the year. Afterwards they dry the fir-cones in the

sun, until the nuts which they contain fall out. The empty husks are

sold for firewood, and the kernels in their stony shells reserved for

exportation. You may see the peasants, men, women, and boys, sorting

them by millions, drying and sifting them upon the open spaces of the

wood, and packing them in sacks to send abroad through Italy. The

_pinocchi_ or kernels of the stone-pine are largely used in cookery,

and those of Ravenna are prized for their good quality and aromatic

flavour. When roasted or pounded, they taste like a softer and more

mealy kind of almonds. The task of gathering this harvest is not a

little dangerous. Men have to cut notches in the straight shafts, and

having climbed, often to the height of eighty feet, to lean upon the

branches, and detach the fir-cones with a pole--and this for every

tree. Some lives, they say, are yearly lost in the business.

As may be imagined, the spaces of this great forest form the haunt of

innumerable living creatures. Lizards run about by myriads in the

grass. Doves coo among the branches of the pines, and nightingales

pour their full-throated music all day and night from thickets of

white-thorn and acacia. The air is sweet with aromatic scents: the

resin of the pine and juniper, the mayflowers and acacia-blossoms, the

violets that spring by thousands in the moss, the wild roses and faint

honeysuckles which throw fragrant arms from bough to bough of ash or

maple, join to make one most delicious perfume. And though the air

upon the neighbouring marsh is poisonous, here it is dry, and spreads

a genial health. The sea-wind murmuring through these thickets at

nightfall or misty sunrise, conveys no fever to the peasants stretched

among their flowers. They watch the red rays of sunset flaming through

the columns of the leafy hall, and flaring on its fretted rafters of

entangled boughs; they see the stars come out, and Hesper gleam, an

eye of brightness, among dewy branches; the moon walks silver-footed

on the velvet tree-tops, while they sleep beside the camp-fires; fresh

morning wakes them to the sound of birds and scent of thyme and

twinkling of dewdrops on the grass around. Meanwhile ague, fever, and

death have been stalking all night long about the plain, within a few

yards of their couch, and not one pestilential breath has reached the

charmed precincts of the forest.

You may ride or drive for miles along green aisles between the pines

in perfect solitude; and yet the creatures of the wood, the sunlight

and the birds, the flowers and tall majestic columns at your side,

prevent all sense of loneliness or fear. Huge oxen haunt the

wilderness--grey creatures, with mild eyes and spreading horns and

stealthy tread. Some are patriarchs of the forest, the fathers and

the mothers of many generations who have been carried from their sides

to serve in ploughs or waggons on the Lombard plain. Others are

yearling calves, intractable and ignorant of labour. In order to

subdue them to the yoke, it is requisite to take them very early from

their native glades, or else they chafe and pine away with weariness.

Then there is a sullen canal, which flows through the forest from the

marshes to the sea; it is alive with frogs and newts and snakes. You

may see these serpents basking on the surface among thickets of the

flowering rush, or coiled about the lily leaves and flowers--lithe

monsters, slippery and speckled, the tyrants of the fen.

It is said that when Dante was living at Ravenna he would spend whole

days alone among the forest glades, thinking of Florence and her civil

wars, and meditating cantos of his poem. Nor have the influences of

the pine-wood failed to leave their trace upon his verse. The charm of

its summer solitude seems to have sunk into his soul; for when he

describes the whispering of winds and singing birds among the boughs

of his terrestrial paradise, he says:--

Non però dal lor esser dritto sparte

Tanto, che gli augelletti per le cime

Lasciasser d' operare ogni lor arte:

Ma con piena letizia l' aure prime,

Cantando, ricevano intra le foglie,

Che tenevan bordone alle sue rime

Tal, qual di ramo in ramo si raccoglie

Per la pineta in sul lito di Chiassi

Quand' Eolo Scirocco fuor discioglie.

With these verses in our minds, while wandering down the grassy

aisles, beside the waters of the solitary place, we seem to meet that

lady singing as she went, and plucking flower by flower, 'like

Proserpine when Ceres lost a daughter, and she lost her spring.'

There, too, the vision of the griffin and the car, of singing

maidens, and of Beatrice descending to the sound of Benedictus and of

falling flowers, her flaming robe and mantle green as grass, and veil

of white, and olive crown, all flashed upon the poet's inner eye, and

he remembered how he bowed before her when a boy. There is yet another

passage in which it is difficult to believe that Dante had not the

pine-forest in his mind. When Virgil and the poet were waiting in

anxiety before the gates of Dis, when the Furies on the wall were

tearing their breasts and crying, 'Venga Medusa, e si 'l farem di

smalto,' suddenly across the hideous river came a sound like that

which whirlwinds make among the shattered branches and bruised stems

of forest-trees; and Dante, looking out with fear upon the foam and

spray and vapour of the flood, saw thousands of the damned flying

before the face of one who forded Styx with feet unwet. 'Like frogs,'

he says, 'they fled, who scurry through the water at the sight of

their foe, the serpent, till each squats and hides himself close to

the ground.' The picture of the storm among the trees might well have

occurred to Dante's mind beneath the roof of pine-boughs. Nor is there

any place in which the simile of the frogs and water-snake attains

such dignity and grandeur. I must confess that till I saw the ponds

and marshes of Ravenna, I used to fancy that the comparison was

somewhat below the greatness of the subject; but there so grave a note

of solemnity and desolation is struck, the scale of Nature is so

large, and the serpents coiling in and out among the lily leaves and

flowers are so much in their right place, that they suggest a scene by

no means unworthy of Dante's conception.

Nor is Dante the only singer who has invested this wood with poetical

associations. It is well known that Boccaccio laid his story of

'Honoria' in the pine-forest, and every student of English literature

must be familiar with the noble tale in verse which Dryden has founded

on this part of the 'Decameron.' We all of us have followed Theodore,

and watched with him the tempest swelling in the grove, and seen the

hapless ghost pursued by demon hounds and hunter down the glades. This

story should be read while storms are gathering upon the distant sea,

or thunderclouds descending from the Apennines, and when the pines

begin to rock and surge beneath the stress of labouring winds. Then

runs the sudden flash of lightning like a rapier through the boughs,

the rain streams hissing down, and the thunder 'breaks like a whole

sea overhead.'

With the Pinetum the name of Byron will be for ever associated. During

his two years' residence in Ravenna he used to haunt its wilderness,

riding alone or in the company of friends. The inscription placed

above the entrance to the house he occupied alludes to it as one of

the objects which principally attracted the poet to the neighbourhood

of Ravenna: 'Impaziente di visitare l' antica selva, che inspirò già

il Divino e Giovanni Boccaccio.' We know, however, that a more

powerful attraction, in the person of the Countess Guiccioli,

maintained his fidelity to 'that place of old renown, once in the

Adrian Sea, Ravenna.'

Between the Bosco, as the people of Ravenna call this pine-wood, and

the city, the marsh stretches for a distance of about three miles. It

is a plain intersected by dykes and ditches, and mapped out into

innumerable rice-fields. For more than half a year it lies under

water, and during the other months exhales a pestilential vapour,

which renders it as uninhabitable as the Roman Campagna; yet in

springtime this dreary flat is even beautiful. The young blades of the

rice shoot up above the water, delicately green and tender. The

ditches are lined with flowering rush and golden flags, while white

and yellow lilies sleep in myriads upon the silent pools. Tamarisks

wave their pink and silver tresses by the road, and wherever a plot of

mossy earth emerges from the marsh, it gleams with purple orchises and

flaming marigolds; but the soil beneath is so treacherous and spongy,

that these splendid blossoms grow like flowers in dreams or fairy

stories. You try in vain to pick them; they elude your grasp, and

flourish in security beyond the reach of arm or stick.

Such is the sight of the old town of Classis. Not a vestige of the

Roman city remains, not a dwelling or a ruined tower, nothing but the

ancient church of S. Apollinare in Classe. Of all desolate buildings

this is the most desolate. Not even the deserted grandeur of S. Paolo

beyond the walls of Rome can equal it. Its bare round campanile gazes

at the sky, which here vaults only sea and plain--a perfect dome,

star-spangled like the roof of Galla Placidia's tomb. Ravenna lies low

to west, the pine-wood stretches away in long monotony to east. There

is nothing else to be seen except the spreading marsh, bounded by dim

snowy Alps and purple Apennines, so very far away that the level rack

of summer clouds seem more attainable and real. What sunsets and

sunrises that tower must see; what glaring lurid afterglows in August,

when the red light scowls upon the pestilential fen; what sheets of

sullen vapour rolling over it in autumn; what breathless heats, and

rainclouds big with thunder; what silences; what unimpeded blasts of

winter winds! One old monk tends this deserted spot. He has the huge

church, with its echoing aisles and marble columns and giddy

bell-tower and cloistered corridors, all to himself. At rare

intervals, priests from Ravenna come to sing some special mass at

these cold altars; pious folk make vows to pray upon their mouldy

steps and kiss the relics which are shown on great occasions. But no

one stays; they hurry, after muttering their prayers, from the

fever-stricken spot, reserving their domestic pieties and customary

devotions for the brighter and newer chapels of the fashionable

churches in Ravenna. So the old monk is left alone to sweep the marsh

water from his church floor, and to keep the green moss from growing

too thickly on its monuments. A clammy conferva covers everything

except the mosaics upon tribune, roof, and clerestory, which defy the

course of age. Christ on His throne _sedet aternumque sedebit_: the

saints around him glitter with their pitiless uncompromising eyes and

wooden gestures, as if twelve centuries had not passed over them, and

they were nightmares only dreamed last night, and rooted in a sick

man's memory. For those gaunt and solemn forms there is no change of

life or end of days. No fever touches them; no dampness of the wind

and rain loosens their firm cement. They stare with senseless faces in

bitter mockery of men who live and die and moulder away beneath. Their

poor old guardian told us it was a weary life. He has had the fever

three times, and does not hope to survive many more Septembers. The

very water that he drinks is brought him from Ravenna; for the vast

fen, though it pours its overflow upon the church floor, and spreads

like a lake around, is death to drink. The monk had a gentle woman's

voice and mild brown eyes. What terrible crime had consigned him to

this living tomb? For what past sorrow is he weary of his life? What

anguish of remorse has driven him to such a solitude? Yet he looked

simple and placid; his melancholy was subdued and calm, as if life

were over for him, and he were waiting for death to come with a

friend's greeting upon noiseless wings some summer night across the

fen-lands in a cloud of soft destructive fever-mist.

Another monument upon the plain is worthy of a visit. It is the

so-called Colonna dei Francesi, a _cinquecento_ pillar of Ionic

design, erected on the spot where Gaston de Foix expired victorious

after one of the bloodiest battles ever fought. The Ronco, a straight

sluggish stream, flows by the lonely spot; mason bees have covered

with laborious stucco-work the scrolls and leafage of its ornaments,

confounding epitaphs and trophies under their mud houses. A few

cypress-trees stand round it, and the dogs and chickens of a

neighbouring farmyard make it their rendezvous. Those mason bees are

like posterity, which settles down upon the ruins of a Baalbec or a

Luxor, setting up its tents, and filling the fair spaces of Hellenic

or Egyptian temples with clay hovels. Nothing differs but the scale;

and while the bees content themselves with filling up and covering,

man destroys the silent places of the past which he appropriates.

In Ravenna itself, perhaps what strikes us most is the abrupt

transition everywhere discernible from monuments of vast antiquity to

buildings of quite modern date. There seems to be no interval between

the marbles and mosaics of Justinian or Theodoric and the

insignificant frippery of the last century. The churches of

Ravenna--S. Vitale, S. Apollinare, and the rest--are too well known,

and have been too often described by enthusiastic antiquaries, to need

a detailed notice in this place. Every one is aware that the

ecclesiastical customs and architecture of the early Church can be

studied in greater perfection here than elsewhere. Not even the

basilicas and mosaics of Rome, nor those of Palermo and Monreale, are

equal for historical interest to those of Ravenna. Yet there is not

one single church which remains entirely unaltered and unspoiled. The

imagination has to supply the atrium or outer portico from one

building, the vaulted baptistery with its marble font from another,

the pulpits and ambones from a third the tribune from a fourth, the

round brick bell-tower from a fifth, and then to cover all the concave

roofs and chapel walls with grave and glittering mosaics.

There is nothing more beautiful in decorative art than the mosaics of

such tiny buildings as the tomb of Galla Placidia or the chapel of the

Bishop's Palace. They are like jewelled and enamelled cases; not an

inch of wall can be seen which is not covered with elaborate patterns

of the brightest colours. Tall date-palms spring from the floor with

fruit and birds among their branches, and between them stand the

pillars and apostles of the Church. In the spandrels and lunettes

above the arches and the windows angels fly with white extended wings.

On every vacant place are scrolls and arabesques of foliage,--birds

and beasts, doves drinking from the vase, and peacocks spreading

gorgeous plumes--a maze of green and gold and blue. Overhead, the

vault is powdered with stars gleaming upon the deepest azure, and in

the midst is set an aureole embracing the majestic head of Christ, or

else the symbol of the sacred fish, or the hand of the Creator

pointing from a cloud. In Galla Placidia's tomb these storied vaults

spring above the sarcophagi of empresses and emperors, each lying in

the place where he was laid more than twelve centuries ago. The light

which struggles through the narrow windows serves to harmonise the

brilliant hues and make a gorgeous gloom.

Besides these more general and decorative subjects, many of the

churches are adorned with historical mosaics, setting forth the Bible

narrative or incidents from the life of Christian emperors and kings.

In S. Apollinare Nuovo there is a most interesting treble series of

such mosaics extending over both walls of the nave. On the left hand,

as we enter, we see the town of Classis; on the right the palace of

Theodoric, its doors and loggie rich with curtains, and its friezes

blazing with coloured ornaments. From the city gate of Classis virgins

issue, and proceed in a long line until they reach Madonna seated on a

throne, with Christ upon her knees, and the three kings in adoration

at her feet. From Theodoric's palace door a similar procession of

saints and martyrs carry us to Christ surrounded by archangels. Above

this double row of saints and virgins stand the fathers and prophets

of the Church, and highest underneath the roof are pictures from the

life of our Lord. It will be remembered in connection with these

subjects that the women sat upon the left and the men upon the right

side of the church. Above the tribune, at the east end of the church,

it was customary to represent the Creative Hand, or the monogram of

the Saviour, or the head of Christ with the letters A and [Greek Ô].

Moses and Elijah frequently stand on either side to symbolise the

transfiguration, while the saints and bishops specially connected with

the church appeared upon a lower row. Then on the side walls were

depicted such subjects as Justinian and Theodora among their

courtiers, or the grant of the privileges of the church to its first

founder from imperial patrons, with symbols of the old Hebraic

ritual--Abel's lamb, the sacrifice of Isaac, Melchisedec's offering of

bread and wine,--which were regarded as the types of Christian

ceremonies. The baptistery was adorned with appropriate mosaics

representing Christ's baptism in Jordan.

Generally speaking, one is struck with the dignity of these designs,

and especially with the combined majesty and sweetness of the face of

Christ. The sense for harmony of hue displayed in their composition is

marvellous. It would be curious to trace in detail the remnants of

classical treatment which may be discerned--Jordan, for instance,

pours his water from an urn like a river-god crowned with sedge--or to

show what points of ecclesiastical tradition are established these

ancient monuments. We find Mariolatry already imminent, the names of

the three kings, Kaspar, Melchior, and Balthazar, the four evangelists

as we now recognise them, and many of the rites and vestments which

Ritualists of all denominations regard with superstitious reverence.

There are two sepulchral monuments in Ravenna which cannot be passed

over unnoticed. The one is that of Theodoric the Goth, crowned by its

semisphere of solid stone, a mighty tomb, well worthy of the conqueror

and king. It stands in a green field, surrounded by acacias, where the

nightingales sing ceaselessly in May. The mason bees have covered it,

and the water has invaded its sepulchral vaults. In spite of many

trials, it seems that human art is unable to pump out the pond and

clear the frogs and efts from the chamber where the great Goth was

laid by Amalasuntha.

The other is Dante's temple, with its basrelief and withered garlands.

The story of his burial, and of the discovery of his real tomb, is

fresh in the memory of every one. But the 'little cupola, more neat

than solemn,' of which Lord Byron speaks, will continue to be the goal

of many a pilgrimage. For myself--though I remember Chateaubriand's

bareheaded genuflection on its threshold, Alfieri's passionate

prostration at the altar-tomb, and Byron's offering of poems on the

poet's shrine--I confess that a single canto of the 'Inferno,' a

single passage of the 'Vita Nuova,' seems more full of soul-stirring

associations than the place where, centuries ago, the mighty dust was

laid. It is the spirit that lives and makes alive. And Dante's spirit

seems more present with us under the pine-branches of the Bosco than

beside his real or fancied tomb. 'He is risen,'--'Lo, I am with you

alway'--these are the words that ought to haunt us in a

burying-ground. There is something affected and self-conscious in

overpowering grief or enthusiasm or humiliation at a tomb.

* * * * *

_RIMINI_

SIGISMONDO PANDOLFO MALATESTA AND LEO BATTISTA ALBERTI

Rimini is a city of about 18,000 souls, famous for its Stabilmento de'

Bagni and its antiquities, seated upon the coast of the Adriatic, a

little to the south-east of the world-historical Rubicon. It is our

duty to mention the baths first among its claims to distinction,

since the prosperity and cheerfulness of the little town depend on

them in a great measure. But visitors from the north will fly from

these, to marvel at the bridge which Augustus built and Tiberius

completed, and which still spans the Marecchia with five gigantic

arches of white Istrian limestone, as solidly as if it had not borne

the tramplings of at least three conquests. The triumphal arch, too,

erected in honour of Augustus, is a notable monument of Roman

architecture. Broad, ponderous, substantial, tufted here and there

with flowering weeds, and surmounted with mediaeval machicolations,

proving it to have sometimes stood for city gate or fortress, it

contrasts most favourably with the slight and somewhat gimcrack arch

of Trajan in the sister city of Ancona. Yet these remains of the

imperial pontifices, mighty and interesting as they are, sink into

comparative insignificance beside the one great wonder of Rimini, the

cathedral remodelled for Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta by Leo Battista

Alberti in 1450. This strange church, one of the earliest extant

buildings in which the Neopaganism of the Renaissance showed itself in

full force, brings together before our memory two men who might be

chosen as typical in their contrasted characters of the transitional

age which gave them birth.

No one with any tincture of literary knowledge is ignorant of the fame

at least of the great Malatesta family--the house of the Wrongheads,

as they were rightly called by some prevision of their future part in

Lombard history. The readers of the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth

cantos of the 'Inferno' have all heard of

E il mastin vecchio e il nuovo da Verucchio

Che fecer di Montagna il mal governo,

while the story of Francesca da Polenta, who was wedded to the

hunchback Giovanni Malatesta and murdered by him with her lover Paolo,

is known not merely to students of Dante, but to readers of Byron and

Leigh Hunt, to admirers of Flaxman, Ary Scheffer, Doré--to all, in

fact, who have of art and letters any love.

The history of these Malatesti, from their first establishment under

Otho III. as lieutenants for the Empire in the Marches of Ancona, down

to their final subjugation by the Papacy in the age of the

Renaissance, is made up of all the vicissitudes which could befall a

mediaeval Italian despotism. Acquiring an unlawful right over the

towns of Rimini, Cesena, Sogliano, Ghiacciuolo, they ruled their petty

principalities like tyrants by the help of the Guelf and Ghibelline

factions, inclining to the one or the other as it suited their humour

or their interest, wrangling among themselves, transmitting the

succession of their dynasty through bastards and by deeds of force,

quarrelling with their neighbours the Counts of Urbino, alternately

defying and submitting to the Papal legates in Romagna, serving as

condottieri in the wars of the Visconti and the state of Venice, and

by their restlessness and genius for military intrigues contributing

in no slight measure to the general disturbance of Italy. The

Malatesti were a race of strongly marked character: more, perhaps,

than any other house of Italian tyrants, they combined for generations

those qualities of the fox and the lion, which Machiavelli thought

indispensable to a successful despot. Son after son, brother with

brother, they continued to be fierce and valiant soldiers, cruel in

peace, hardy in war, but treasonable and suspicious in all

transactions that could not be settled by the sword. Want of union,

with them as with the Baglioni and many other of the minor noble

families in Italy, prevented their founding a substantial dynasty.

Their power, based on force, was maintained by craft and crime, and

transmitted through tortuous channels by intrigue. While false in

their dealings with the world at large, they were diabolical in the

perfidy with which they treated one another. No feudal custom, no

standard of hereditary right, ruled the succession in their family.

Therefore the ablest Malatesta for the moment clutched what he could

of the domains that owned his house for masters. Partitions among sons

or brothers, mutually hostile and suspicious, weakened the whole

stock. Yet they were great enough to hold their own for centuries

among the many tyrants who infested Lombardy. That the other princely

families of Romagna, Emilia, and the March were in the same state of

internal discord and dismemberment, was probably one reason why the

Malatesti stood their ground so firmly as they did.

So far as Rimini is concerned, the house of Malatesta culminated in

Sigismondo Pandolfo, son of Gian Galeazzo Visconti's general, the

perfidious Pandolfo. It was he who built the Rocca, or castle of the

despots, which stands a little way outside the town, commanding a fair

view of Apennine tossed hill-tops and broad Lombard plain, and who

remodelled the Cathedral of S. Francis on a plan suggested by the

greatest genius of the age. Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta was one of

the strangest products of the earlier Renaissance. To enumerate the

crimes which he committed within the sphere of his own family,

mysterious and inhuman outrages which render the tale of the Cenci

credible, would violate the decencies of literature. A thoroughly

bestial nature gains thus much with posterity that its worst qualities

must be passed by in silence. It is enough to mention that he murdered

three wives in succession,[2] Bussoni di Carmagnuola, Guinipera

d'Este, and Polissena Sforza, on various pretexts of infidelity, and

carved horns upon his own tomb with this fantastic legend

underneath:--

Porto le corna ch' ognuno le vede,

E tal le porta che non se lo crede.

He died in wedlock with the beautiful and learned Isotta degli Atti,

who had for some time been his mistress. But, like most of the

Malatesti, he left no legitimate offspring. Throughout his life he was

distinguished for bravery and cunning, for endurance of fatigue and

rapidity of action, for an almost fretful rashness in the execution of

his schemes, and for a character terrible in its violence. He was

acknowledged as a great general; yet nothing succeeded with him. The

long warfare which he carried on against the Duke of Montefeltro ended

in his discomfiture. Having begun by defying the Holy See, he was

impeached at Rome for heresy, parricide, incest, adultery, rape, and

sacrilege, burned in effigy by Pope Pius II., and finally restored to

the bosom of the Church, after suffering the despoliation of almost

all his territories, in 1463. The occasion on which this fierce and

turbulent despiser of laws human and divine was forced to kneel as a

penitent before the Papal legate in the gorgeous temple dedicated to

his own pride, in order that the ban of excommunication might be

removed from Rimini, was one of those petty triumphs, interesting

chiefly for their picturesqueness, by which the Popes confirmed their

questionable rights over the cities of Romagna. Sigismondo, shorn of

his sovereignty, took the command of the Venetian troops against the

Turks in the Morea, and returned in 1465, crowned with laurels, to die

at Rimini in the scene of his old splendour.

A very characteristic incident belongs to this last act of his life.

Dissolute, treacherous, and inhuman as he was, the tyrant of Rimini

had always encouraged literature, and delighted in the society of

artists. He who could brook no contradiction from a prince or soldier,

allowed the pedantic scholars of the sixteenth century to dictate to

him in matters of taste, and sat with exemplary humility at the feet

of Latinists like Porcellio, Basinio, and Trebanio. Valturio, the

engineer, and Alberti, the architect, were his familiar friends; and

the best hours of his life were spent in conversation with these men.

Now that he found himself upon the sacred soil of Greece, he was

determined not to return to Italy empty-handed. Should he bring

manuscripts or marbles, precious vases or inscriptions in half-legible

Greek character? These relics were greedily sought for by the

potentates of Italian cities; and no doubt Sigismondo enriched his

library with some such treasures. But he obtained a nobler

prize--nothing less than the body of a saint of scholarship, the

authentic bones of the great Platonist, Gemisthus Pletho.[3] These he

exhumed from their Greek grave and caused them to be deposited in a

stone sarcophagus outside the cathedral of his building in Rimini. The

Venetians, when they stole the body of S. Mark from Alexandria, were

scarcely more pleased than was Sigismondo with the acquisition of this

Father of the Neopagan faith. Upon the tomb we still may read this

legend: 'Jemisthii Bizantii philosopher sua temp principis reliquum

Sig. Pan. Mal. Pan. F. belli Pelop adversus Turcor regem Imp ob

ingentem eruditorum quo flagrat amorem huc afferendum introque

mittendum curavit MCCCCLXVI.' Of the Latinity of the inscription much

cannot be said; but it means that 'Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta,

having served as general against the Turks in the Morea, induced by

the great love with which he burns for all learned men, brought and

placed here the remains of Gemisthus of Byzantium, the prince of the

philosophers of his day.'

Sigismondo's portrait, engraved on medals, and sculptured upon every

frieze and point of vantage in the Cathedral of Rimini, well denotes

the man. His face is seen in profile. The head, which is low and flat

above the forehead, rising swiftly backward from the crown, carries a

thick bushy shock of hair curling at the ends, such as the Italians

call a _zazzera_. The eye is deeply sunk, with long venomous flat

eyelids, like those which Leonardo gives to his most wicked faces. The

nose is long and crooked, curved like a vulture's over a petulant

mouth, with lips deliberately pressed together, as though it were

necessary to control some nervous twitching. The cheek is broad, and

its bone is strongly marked. Looking at these features in repose, we

cannot but picture to our fancy what expression they might assume

under a sudden fit of fury, when the sinews of the face were

contracted with quivering spasms, and the lips writhed in sympathy

with knit forehead and wrinkled eyelids.

Allusion has been made to the Cathedral of S. Francis at Rimini, as

the great ornament of the town, and the chief monument of Sigismondo's

fame. It is here that all the Malatesti lie. Here too is the chapel

consecrated to Isotta, 'Divæ Isottæ Sacrum;' and the tombs of the

Malatesta ladies, 'Malatestorum domûs heroidum sepulchrum;' and

Sigismondo's own grave with the cuckold's horns and scornful epitaph.

Nothing but the fact that the church is duly dedicated to S. Francis,

and that its outer shell of classic marble encases an old Gothic

edifice, remains to remind us that it is a Christian place of

worship.[4] It has no sanctity, no spirit of piety. The pride of the

tyrant whose legend--'Sigismundus Pandulphus Malatesta Pan. F. Fecit

Anno Gratiæ MCCCCL'--occupies every arch and stringcourse of the

architecture, and whose coat-of-arms and portrait in medallion, with

his cipher and his emblems of an elephant and a rose, are wrought in

every piece of sculptured work throughout the building, seems so to

fill this house of prayer that there is no room left for God. Yet the

Cathedral of Rimini remains a monument of first-rate importance for

all students who seek to penetrate the revived Paganism of the

fifteenth century. It serves also to bring a far more interesting

Italian of that period than the tyrant of Rimini himself, before our

notice.

In the execution of his design, Sigismondo received the assistance of

one of the most remarkable men of this or any other age. Leo Battista

Alberti, a scion of the noble Florentine house of that name, born

during the exile of his parents, and educated in the Venetian

territory, was endowed by nature with aptitudes, faculties, and

sensibilities so varied, as to deserve the name of universal genius.

Italy in the Renaissance period was rich in natures of this sort, to

whom nothing that is strange or beautiful seemed unfamiliar, and who,

gifted with a kind of divination, penetrated the secrets of the world

by sympathy. To Pico della Mirandola, Lionardo da Vinci, and Michel

Agnolo Buonarroti may be added Leo Battista Alberti. That he achieved

less than his great compeers, and that he now exists as the shadow of

a mighty name, was the effect of circumstances. He came half a century

too early into the world, and worked as a pioneer rather than a

settler of the realm which Lionardo ruled as his demesne. Very early

in his boyhood Alberti showed the versatility of his talents. The use

of arms, the management of horses, music, painting, modelling for

sculpture, mathematics, classical and modern literature, physical

science as then comprehended, and all the bodily exercises proper to

the estate of a young nobleman, were at his command. His biographer

asserts that he was never idle, never subject to ennui or fatigue. He

used to say that books at times gave him the same pleasure as

brilliant jewels or perfumed flowers: hunger and sleep could not keep

him from them then. At other times the letters on the page appeared to

him like twining and contorted scorpions, so that he preferred to gaze

on anything but written scrolls. He would then turn to music or

painting, or to the physical sports in which he excelled. The language

in which this alternation of passion and disgust for study is

expressed, bears on it the stamp of Alberti's peculiar temperament,

his fervid and imaginative genius, instinct with subtle sympathies and

strange repugnances. Flying from his study, he would then betake

himself to the open air. No one surpassed him in running, in

wrestling, in the force with which he cast his javelin or discharged

his arrows. So sure was his aim and so skilful his cast, that he could

fling a farthing from the pavement of the square, and make it ring

against a church roof far above. When he chose to jump, he put his

feet together and bounded over the shoulders of men standing erect

upon the ground. On horseback he maintained perfect equilibrium, and

seemed incapable of fatigue. The most restive and vicious animals

trembled under him and became like lambs. There was a kind of

magnetism in the man. We read, besides these feats of strength and

skill, that he took pleasure in climbing mountains, for no other

purpose apparently than for the joy of being close to nature.

In this, as in many other of his instincts, Alberti was before his

age. To care for the beauties of landscape unadorned by art, and to

sympathise with sublime or rugged scenery, was not in the spirit of

the Renaissance. Humanity occupied the attention of poets and

painters; and the age was yet far distant when the pantheistic feeling

for the world should produce the art of Wordsworth and of Turner. Yet

a few great natures even then began to comprehend the charm and

mystery which the Greeks had imaged in their Pan, the sense of an

all-pervasive spirit in wild places, the feeling of a hidden want, the

invisible tie which makes man a part of rocks and woods and streams

around him. Petrarch had already ascended the summit of Mont Ventoux,

to meditate, with an exaltation of the soul he scarcely understood,

upon the scene spread at his feet and above his head. Æneas Sylvius

Piccolomini delighted in wild places for no mere pleasure of the

chase, but for the joy he took in communing with nature. How S.

Francis found God in the sun and the air, the water and the stars, we

know by his celebrated hymn; and of Dante's acute observation, every

canto of the 'Divine Comedy' is witness.

Leo Alberti was touched in spirit by even a deeper and a stranger

pathos than any of these men: 'In the early spring, when he beheld the

meadows and hills covered with flowers, and saw the trees and plants

of all kinds bearing promise of fruit, his heart became exceeding

sorrowful; and when in autumn he looked on fields heavy with harvest

and orchards apple-laden, he felt such grief that many even saw him

weep for the sadness of his soul.' It would seem that he scarcely

understood the source of this sweet trouble: for at such times he

compared the sloth and inutility of men with the industry and

fertility of nature; as though this were the secret of his melancholy.

A poet of our century has noted the same stirring of the spirit, and

has striven to account for it:--

Tears from the depth of some divine despair

Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,

In looking on the happy autumn fields,

And thinking of the days that are no more.

Both Alberti and Tennyson have connected the _mal du pays_ of the

human soul for that ancient country of its birth, the mild Saturnian

earth from which we sprang, with a sense of loss. It is the waste of

human energy that affects Alberti; the waste of human life touches the

modern poet. Yet both perhaps have scarcely interpreted their own

spirit; for is not the true source of tears deeper and more secret?

Man is a child of nature in the simplest sense; and the stirrings of

the secular breasts that gave him suck, and on which he even now must

hang, have potent influences over his emotions.

Of Alberti's extraordinary sensitiveness to all such impressions many

curious tales are told. The sight of refulgent jewels, of flowers, and

of fair landscapes, had the same effect upon his nerves as the sound

of the Dorian mood upon the youths whom Pythagoras cured of passion by

music. He found in them an anodyne for pain, a restoration from

sickness. Like Walt Whitman, who adheres to nature by closer and more

vital sympathy than any other poet of the modern world, Alberti felt

the charm of excellent old age no less than that of florid youth. 'On

old men gifted with a noble presence and hale and vigorous, he gazed

again and again, and said that he revered in them the delights of

nature (_naturæ delitias_).' Beasts and birds and all living creatures

moved him to admiration for the grace with which they had been gifted,

each in his own kind. It is even said that he composed a funeral

oration for a dog which he had loved and which died.

To this sensibility for all fair things in nature, Alberti added the

charm of a singularly sweet temper and graceful conversation. The

activity of his mind, which was always being exercised on subjects of

grave speculation, removed him from the noise and bustle of

commonplace society. He was somewhat silent, inclined to solitude,

and of a pensive countenance; yet no man found him difficult of

access: his courtesy was exquisite, and among familiar friends he was

noted for the flashes of a delicate and subtle wit. Collections were

made of his apophthegms by friends, and some are recorded by his

anonymous biographer.[5] Their finer perfume, as almost always happens

with good sayings which do not certain the full pith of a proverb, but

owe their force, in part at least, to the personality of their author,

and to the happy moment of their production, has evanesced. Here,

however, is one which seems still to bear the impress of Alberti's

genius: 'Gold is the soul of labour, and labour the slave of

pleasure.' Of women he used to say that their inconstancy was an

antidote to their falseness; for if a woman could but persevere in

what she undertook, all the fair works of men would be ruined. One of

his strongest moral sentences is aimed at envy, from which he suffered

much in his own life, and against which he guarded with a curious

amount of caution. His own family grudged the distinction which his

talents gained for him, and a dark story is told of a secret attempt

made by them to assassinate him through his servants. Alberti met

these ignoble jealousies with a stately calm and a sweet dignity of

demeanour, never condescending to accuse his relatives, never seeking

to retaliate, but acting always for the honour of his illustrious

house. In the same spirit of generosity he refused to enter into wordy

warfare with detractors and calumniators, sparing the reputation even

of his worst enemy when chance had placed him in his power. This

moderation both of speech and conduct was especially distinguished in

an age which tolerated the fierce invectives of Filelfo, and applauded

the vindictive courage of Cellini. To money Alberti showed a calm

indifference. He committed his property to his friends and shared with

them in common. Nor was he less careless about vulgar fame, spending

far more pains in the invention of machinery and the discovery of

laws, than in their publication to the world. His service was to

knowledge, not to glory. Self-control was another of his eminent

qualities. With the natural impetuosity of a large heart, and the

vivacity of a trained athlete, he yet never allowed himself to be

subdued by anger or by sensual impulses, but took pains to preserve

his character unstained and dignified before the eyes of men. A story

is told of him which may remind us of Goethe's determination to

overcome his giddiness. In his youth his head was singularly sensitive

to changes of temperature; but by gradual habituation he brought

himself at last to endure the extremes of heat and cold bareheaded. In

like manner he had a constitutional disgust for onions and honey; so

powerful, that the very sight of these things made him sick. Yet by

constantly viewing and touching what was disagreeable, he conquered

these dislikes; and proved that men have a complete mastery over what

is merely instinctive in their nature. His courage corresponded to his

splendid physical development. When a boy of fifteen, he severely

wounded himself in the foot. The gash had to be probed and then sewn

up. Alberti not only bore the pain of this operation without a groan,

but helped the surgeon with his own hands; and effected a cure of the

fever which succeeded by the solace of singing to his cithern. For

music he had a genius of the rarest order; and in painting he is said

to have achieved success. Nothing, however, remains of his work and

from what Vasari says of it, we may fairly conclude that he gave less

care to the execution of finished pictures, than to drawings

subsidiary to architectural and mechanical designs. His biographer

relates that when he had completed a painting, he called children and

asked them what it meant. If they did not know, he reckoned it a

failure. He was also in the habit of painting from memory. While at

Venice, he put on canvas the faces of friends at Florence whom he had

not seen for months. That the art of painting was subservient in his

estimation to mechanics, is indicated by what we hear about the

camera, in which he showed landscapes by day and the revolutions of

the stars by night, so lively drawn that the spectators were affected

with amazement. The semi-scientific impulse to extend man's mastery

over nature, the magician's desire to penetrate secrets, which so

powerfully influenced the development of Lionardo's genius, seems to

have overcome the purely æsthetic instincts of Alberti, so that he

became in the end neither a great artist like Raphael, nor a great

discoverer like Galileo, but rather a clairvoyant to whom the miracles

of nature and of art lie open.

After the first period of youth was over, Leo Battista Alberti devoted

his great faculties and all his wealth of genius to the study of the

law--then, as now, the quicksand of the noblest natures. The industry

with which he applied himself to the civil and ecclesiastical codes

broke his health. For recreation he composed a Latin comedy called

'Philodoxeos,' which imposed upon the judgment of scholars, and was

ascribed as a genuine antique to Lepidus, the comic poet. Feeling

stronger, Alberti returned at the age of twenty to his law studies,

and pursued them in the teeth of disadvantages. His health was still

uncertain, and the fortune of an exile reduced him to the utmost want.

It was no wonder that under these untoward circumstances even his

Herculean strength gave way. Emaciated and exhausted, he lost the

clearness of his eyesight, and became subject to arterial

disturbances, which filled his ears with painful sounds. This nervous

illness is not dissimilar to that which Rousseau describes in the

confessions of his youth. In vain, however, his physicians warned

Alberti of impending peril. A man of so much stanchness, accustomed

to control his nature with an iron will, is not ready to accept

advice. Alberti persevered in his studies, until at last the very seat

of intellect was invaded. His memory began to fail him for names,

while he still retained with wonderful accuracy whatever he had seen

with his eyes. It was now impossible to think of law as a profession.

Yet since he could not live without severe mental exercise, he had

recourse to studies which tax the verbal memory less than the

intuitive faculties of the reason. Physics and mathematics became his

chief resource; and he devoted his energies to literature. His

'Treatise on the Family' may be numbered among the best of those

compositions on social and speculative subjects in which the Italians

of the Renaissance sought to rival Cicero. His essays on the arts are

mentioned by Vasari with sincere approbation. Comedies, interludes,

orations, dialogues, and poems flowed with abundance from his facile

pen. Some were written in Latin, which he commanded more than fairly;

some in the Tuscan tongue, of which owing to the long exile of his

family in Lombardy, he is said to have been less a master. It was

owing to this youthful illness, from which apparently his constitution

never wholly recovered, that Alberti's genius was directed to

architecture.

Through his friendship with Flavio Biondo, the famous Roman antiquary,

Alberti received an introduction to Nicholas V. at the time when this,

the first great Pope of the Renaissance, was engaged in rebuilding the

palaces and fortifications of Rome. Nicholas discerned the genius of

the man, and employed him as his chief counsellor in all matters of

architecture. When the Pope died, he was able, while reciting his long

Latin will upon his deathbed, to boast that he had restored the Holy

See to its due dignity, and the Eternal City to the splendour worthy

of the seat of Christendom. The accomplishment of the second part of

his work he owed to the genius of Alberti. After doing thus much for

Rome under Thomas of Sarzana, and before beginning to beautify

Florence at the instance of the Rucellai family, Alberti entered the

service of the Malatesta, and undertook to remodel the Cathedral of S.

Francis at Rimini. He found it a plain Gothic structure with apse and

side chapels. Such churches are common enough in Italy, where pointed

architecture never developed its true character of complexity and

richness, but was doomed to the vast vacuity exemplified in S.

Petronio of Bologna. He left it a strange medley of mediæval and

Renaissance work, a symbol of that dissolving scene in the world's

pantomime, when the spirit of classic art, as yet but little

comprehended, was encroaching on the early Christian taste. Perhaps

the mixture of styles so startling in S. Francesco ought not to be

laid to the charge of Alberti, who had to execute the task of turning

a Gothic into a classic building. All that he could do was to alter

the whole exterior of the church, by affixing a screen-work of Roman

arches and Corinthian pilasters, so as to hide the old design and yet

to leave the main features of the fabric, the windows and doors

especially, _in statu quo_. With the interior he dealt upon the same

general principle, by not disturbing its structure, while he covered

every available square inch of surface with decorations alien to the

Gothic manner. Externally, S. Francesco is perhaps the most original

and graceful of the many attempts made by Italian builders to fuse the

mediæval and the classic styles. For Alberti attempted nothing less. A

century elapsed before Palladio, approaching the problem from a

different point of view, restored the antique in its purity, and

erected in the Palazzo della Ragione of Vicenza an almost unique

specimen of resuscitated Roman art.

Internally, the beauty of the church is wholly due to its exquisite

wall-ornaments. These consist for the most part of low reliefs in a

soft white stone, many of them thrown out upon a blue ground in the

style of Della Robbia. Allegorical figures designed with the purity of

outline we admire in Botticelli, draperies that Burne-Jones might

copy, troops of singing boys in the manner of Donatello, great angels

traced upon the stone so delicately that they seem to be rather drawn

than sculptured, statuettes in niches, personifications of all arts

and sciences alternating with half-bestial shapes of satyrs and

sea-children:--such are the forms which fill the spaces of the chapel

walls, and climb the pilasters, and fret the arches, in such abundance

that had the whole church been finished as it was designed, it would

have presented one splendid though bizarre effect of incrustation.

Heavy screens of Verona marble, emblazoned in open arabesques with the

ciphers of Sigismondo and Isotta, with coats-of-arms, emblems, and

medallion portraits, shut the chapels from the nave. Who produced all

this sculpture it is difficult to say. Some of it is very good: much

is indifferent. We may hazard the opinion that, besides Bernardo

Ciuffagni, of whom Vasari speaks, some pupils of Donatello and

Benedetto da Majano worked at it. The influence of the sculptors of

Florence is everywhere perceptible.

Whatever be the merit of these reliefs, there is no doubt that they

fairly represent one of the most interesting moments in the history of

modern art. Gothic inspiration had failed; the early Tuscan style of

the Pisani had been worked out; Michelangelo was yet far distant, and

the abundance of classic models had not overwhelmed originality. The

sculptors of the school of Ghiberti and Donatello, who are represented

in this church, were essentially pictorial, preferring low to high

relief, and relief in general to detached figures. Their style, like

the style of Boiardo in poetry, of Botticelli in painting, is specific

to Italy in the middle of the fifteenth century. Mediæval standards of

taste were giving way to classical, Christian sentiment to Pagan; yet

the imitation of the antique had not been carried so far as to efface

the spontaneity of the artist, and enough remained of Christian

feeling to tinge the fancy with a grave and sweet romance. The

sculptor had the skill and mastery to express his slightest shade of

thought with freedom, spirit, and precision. Yet his work showed no

sign of conventionality, no adherence to prescribed rules. Every

outline, every fold of drapery, every attitude was pregnant, to the

artist's own mind at any rate, with meaning. In spite of its

symbolism, what he wrought was never mechanically figurative, but

gifted with the independence of its own beauty, vital with an

inbreathed spirit of life. It was a happy moment, when art had reached

consciousness, and the artist had not yet become self-conscious. The

hand and the brain then really worked together for the procreation of

new forms of grace, not for the repetition of old models, or for the

invention of the strange and startling. 'Delicate, sweet, and

captivating,' are good adjectives to express the effect produced upon

the mind by the contemplation even of the average work of this period.

To study the flowing lines of the great angels traced upon the walls

of the Chapel of S. Sigismund in the Cathedral of Rimini, to follow

the undulations of their drapery that seems to float, to feel the

dignified urbanity of all their gestures, is like listening to one of

those clear early Italian compositions for the voice, which surpasses

in suavity of tone and grace of movement all that Music in her

full-grown vigour has produced. There is indeed something infinitely

charming in the crepuscular moments of the human mind. Whether it be

the rathe loveliness of an art still immature, or the beauty of art

upon the wane--whether, in fact, the twilight be of morning or of

evening, we find in the masterpieces of such periods a placid calm and

chastened pathos, as of a spirit self-withdrawn from vulgar cares,

which in the full light of meridian splendour is lacking. In the

Church of S. Francesco at Rimini the tempered clearness of the dawn is

just about to broaden into day.

* * * * *

_MAY IN UMBRIA_

FROM ROME TO TERNI

We left Rome in clear sunset light. The Alban Hills defined themselves

like a cameo of amethyst upon a pale blue distance; and over the

Sabine Mountains soared immeasurable moulded domes of alabaster

thunderclouds, casting deep shadows, purple and violet, across the

slopes of Tivoli. To westward the whole sky was lucid, like some

half-transparent topaz, flooded with slowly yellowing sunbeams. The

Campagna has often been called a garden of wild-flowers. Just now

poppy and aster, gladiolus and thistle, embroider it with patterns

infinite and intricate beyond the power of art. They have already mown

the hay in part; and the billowy tracts of greyish green, where no

flowers are now in bloom, supply a restful groundwork to those

brilliant patches of diapered _fioriture_. These are like

praying-carpets spread for devotees upon the pavement of a mosque

whose roof is heaven. In the level light the scythes of the mowers

flash as we move past. From their bronzed foreheads the men toss

masses of dark curls. Their muscular flanks and shoulders sway

sideways from firm yet pliant reins. On one hill, fronting the sunset,

there stands a herd of some thirty huge grey oxen, feeding and raising

their heads to look at us, with just a flush of crimson on their

horns and dewlaps. This is the scale of Mason's and of Costa's

colouring. This is the breadth and magnitude of Rome.

Thus, through dells of ilex and oak, yielding now a glimpse of Tiber

and S. Peter's, now opening on a purple section of the distant Sabine

Hills, we came to Monte Rotondo. The sun sank; and from the flames

where he had perished, Hesper and the thin moon, very white and keen,

grew slowly into sight. Now we follow the Tiber, a swollen, hurrying,

turbid river, in which the mellowing Western sky reflects itself. This

changeful mirror of swift waters spreads a dazzling foreground to

valley, hill, and lustrous heaven. There is orange on the far horizon,

and a green ocean above, in which sea-monsters fashioned from the

clouds are floating. Yonder swims an elf with luminous hair astride

upon a sea-horse, and followed by a dolphin plunging through the fiery

waves. The orange deepens into dying red. The green divides into

daffodil and beryl. The blue above grows fainter, and the moon and

stars shine stronger.

Through these celestial changes we glide into a landscape fit for

Francia and the early Umbrian painters. Low hills to right and left;

suavely modelled heights in the far distance; a very quiet width of

plain, with slender trees ascending into the pellucid air; and down in

the mystery of the middle distance a glimpse of heaven-reflecting

water. The magic of the moon and stars lends enchantment to this

scene. No painting could convey their influences. Sometimes both

luminaries tremble, all dispersed and broken, on the swirling river.

Sometimes they sleep above the calm cool reaches of a rush-grown mere.

And here and there a ruined turret, with a broken window and a tuft

of shrubs upon the rifted battlement, gives value to the fading pallor

of the West. The last phase in the sunset is a change to blue-grey

monochrome, faintly silvered with starlight; hills, Tiber, fields and

woods, all floating in aërial twilight. There is no definition of

outline now. The daffodil of the horizon has faded into scarcely

perceptible pale greenish yellow.

We have passed Stimigliano. Through the mystery of darkness we hurry

past the bridges of Augustus and the lights of Narni.

THE CASCADES OF TERNI

The Velino is a river of considerable volume which rises in the

highest region of the Abruzzi, threads the upland valley of Rieti, and

precipitates itself by an artificial channel over cliffs about seven

hundred feet in height into the Nera. The water is densely charged

with particles of lime. This calcareous matter not only tends

continually to choke its bed, but clothes the precipices over which

the torrent thunders with fantastic drapery of stalactite; and,

carried on the wind in foam, incrusts the forests that surround the

falls with fine white dust. These famous cascades are undoubtedly the

most sublime and beautiful which Europe boasts; and their situation is

worthy of so great a natural wonder. We reach them through a noble

mid-Italian landscape, where the mountain forms are austere and boldly

modelled, but the vegetation, both wild and cultivated, has something

of the South-Italian richness. The hillsides are a labyrinth of box

and arbutus, with coronilla in golden bloom. The turf is starred with

cyclamens and orchises. Climbing the staircase paths beside the falls

in morning sunlight, or stationed on the points of vantage that

command their successive cataracts, we enjoyed a spectacle which might

be compared in its effect upon the mind to the impression left by a

symphony or a tumultuous lyric. The turbulence and splendour, the

swiftness and resonance, the veiling of the scene in smoke of

shattered water-masses, the withdrawal of these veils according as the

volume of the river slightly shifted in its fall, the rainbows

shimmering on the silver spray, the shivering of poplars hung above

impendent precipices, the stationary grandeur of the mountains keeping

watch around, the hurry and the incoherence of the cataracts, the

immobility of force and changeful changelessness in nature, were all

for me the elements of one stupendous poem. It was like an ode of

Shelley translated into symbolism, more vivid through inarticulate

appeal to primitive emotion than any words could be.

MONTEFALCO

The rich land of the Clitumnus is divided into meadows by transparent

watercourses, gliding with a glassy current over swaying reeds.

Through this we pass, and leave Bevagna to the right, and ascend one

of those long gradual roads which climb the hills where all the cities

of the Umbrians perch. The view expands, revealing Spello, Assisi,

Perugia on its mountain buttress, and the far reaches northward of the

Tiber valley. Then Trevi and Spoleto came into sight, and the severe

hill-country above Gubbio in part disclosed itself. Over Spoleto the

fierce witch-haunted heights of Norcia rose forbidding. This is the

kind of panorama that dilates the soul. It is so large, so dignified,

so beautiful in tranquil form. The opulent abundance of the plain

contrasts with the severity of mountain ranges desolately grand; and

the name of each of all those cities thrills the heart with memories.

The main object of a visit to Montefalco is to inspect its many

excellent frescoes; painted histories of S. Francis and S. Jerome, by

Benozzo Gozzoli; saints, angels, and Scripture episodes by the gentle

Tiberio d'Assisi. Full justice had been done to these, when a little

boy, seeing us lingering outside the church of S. Chiara, asked

whether we should not like to view the body of the saint. This

privilege could be purchased at the price of a small fee. It was only

necessary to call the guardian of her shrine at the high altar.

Indolent, and in compliant mood, with languid curiosity and half an

hour to spare, we assented. A handsome young man appeared, who

conducted us with decent gravity into a little darkened chamber behind

the altar. There he lighted wax tapers, opened sliding doors in what

looked like a long coffin, and drew curtains. Before us in the dim

light there lay a woman covered with a black nun's dress. Only her

hands, and the exquisitely beautiful pale contour of her face

(forehead, nose, mouth, and chin, modelled in purest outline, as

though the injury of death had never touched her) were visible. Her

closed eyes seemed to sleep. She had the perfect peace of Luini's S.

Catherine borne by the angels to her grave on Sinai. I have rarely

seen anything which surprised and touched me more. The religious

earnestness of the young custode, the hushed adoration of the

country-folk who had silently assembled round us, intensified the

sympathy-inspiring beauty of the slumbering girl. Could Julia,

daughter of Claudius, have been fairer than this maiden, when the

Lombard workmen found her in her Latin tomb, and brought her to be

worshipped on the Capitol? S. Chiara's shrine was hung round with her

relics; and among these the heart extracted from her body was

suspended. Upon it, apparently wrought into the very substance of the

mummied flesh, were impressed a figure of the crucified Christ, the

scourge, and the five stigmata. The guardian's faith in this

miraculous witness to her sainthood, the gentle piety of the men and

women who knelt before it, checked all expressions of incredulity. We

abandoned ourselves to the genius of the place; forgot even to ask

what Santa Chiara was sleeping here; and withdrew, toned to a not

unpleasing melancholy. The world-famous S. Clair, the spiritual sister

of S. Francis, lies in Assisi. I have often asked myself, Who, then,

was this nun? What history had she? And I think now of this girl as of

a damsel of romance, a Sleeping Beauty in the wood of time, secluded

from intrusive elements of fact, and folded in the love and faith of

her own simple worshippers. Among the hollows of Arcadia, how many

rustic shrines in ancient days held saints of Hellas, apocryphal,

perhaps, like this, but hallowed by tradition and enduring homage![6]

FOLIGNO

In the landscape of Raphael's votive picture, known as the Madonna di

Foligno, there is a town with a few towers, placed upon a broad plain

at the edge of some blue hills. Allowing for that license as to

details which imaginative masters permitted themselves in matters of

subordinate importance, Raphael's sketch is still true to Foligno. The

place has not materially changed since the beginning of the sixteenth

century. Indeed, relatively to the state of Italy at large, it is

still the same as in the days of ancient Rome. Foligno forms a station

of commanding interest between Rome and the Adriatic upon the great

Flaminian Way. At Foligno the passes of the Apennines debouch into the

Umbrian plain, which slopes gradually toward the valley of the Tiber,

and from it the valley of the Nera is reached by an easy ascent

beneath the walls of Spoleto. An army advancing from the north by the

Metaurus and the Furlo Pass must find itself at Foligno; and the level

champaign round the city is well adapted to the maintenance and

exercises of a garrison. In the days of the Republic and the Empire,

the value of this position was well understood; but Foligno's

importance, as the key to the Flaminian Way, was eclipsed by two

flourishing cities in its immediate vicinity, Hispellum and Mevania,

the modern Spello and Bevagna. We might hazard a conjecture that the

Lombards, when they ruled the Duchy of Spoleto, following their usual

policy of opposing new military centres to the ancient Roman

municipia, encouraged Fulginium at the expense of her two neighbours.

But of this there is no certainty to build upon. All that can be

affirmed with accuracy is that in the Middle Ages, while Spello and

Bevagna declined into the inferiority of dependent burghs, Foligno

grew in power and became the chief commune of this part of Umbria. It

was famous during the last centuries of struggle between the Italian

burghers and their native despots, for peculiar ferocity in civil

strife. Some of the bloodiest pages in mediæval Italian history are

those which relate the vicissitudes of the Trinci family, the

exhaustion of Foligno by internal discord, and its final submission to

the Papal power. Since railways have been carried from Rome through

Narni and Spoleto to Ancona and Perugia, Foligno has gained

considerably in commercial and military status. It is the point of

intersection for three lines; the Italian government has made it a

great cavalry depôt, and there are signs of reviving traffic in its

decayed streets. Whether the presence of a large garrison has already

modified the population, or whether we may ascribe something to the

absence of Roman municipal institutions in the far past, and to the

savagery of the mediæval period, it is difficult to say. Yet the

impression left by Foligno upon the mind is different from that of

Assisi, Spello, and Montefalco, which are distinguished for a certain

grace and gentleness in their inhabitants.

My window in the city wall looks southward across the plain to

Spoleto, with Montefalco perched aloft upon the right, and Trevi on

its mountain-bracket to the left. From the topmost peaks of the Sabine

Apennines, gradual tender sloping lines descend to find their quiet in

the valley of Clitumnus. The space between me and that distance is

infinitely rich with every sort of greenery, dotted here and there

with towers and relics of baronial houses. The little town is in

commotion; for the working men of Foligno and its neighbourhood have

resolved to spend their earnings on a splendid festa--horse-races, and

two nights of fireworks. The acacias and paulownias on the ramparts

are in full bloom of creamy white and lilac. In the glare of Bengal

lights these trees, with all their pendulous blossoms, surpassed the

most fantastic of artificial decorations. The rockets sent aloft into

the sky amid that solemn Umbrian landscape were nowise out of harmony

with nature. I never sympathised with critics who resent the intrusion

of fireworks upon scenes of natural beauty. The Giessbach, lighted up

at so much per head on stated evenings, with a band playing and a

crowd of cockneys staring, presents perhaps an incongruous spectacle.

But where, as here at Foligno, a whole city has made itself a

festival, where there are multitudes of citizens and soldiers and

country-people slowly moving and gravely admiring, with the decency

and order characteristic of an Italian crowd, I have nothing but a

sense of satisfaction.

It is sometimes the traveller's good fortune in some remote place to

meet with an inhabitant who incarnates and interprets for him the

_genius loci_ as he has conceived it. Though his own subjectivity will

assuredly play a considerable part in such an encounter, transferring

to his chance acquaintance qualities he may not possess, and

connecting this personality in some purely imaginative manner with

thoughts derived from study, or impressions made by nature; yet the

stranger will henceforth become the meeting-point of many memories,

the central figure in a composition which derives from him its

vividness. Unconsciously and innocently he has lent himself to the

creation of a picture, and round him, as around the hero of a myth,

have gathered thoughts and sentiments of which he had himself no

knowledge. On one of these nights I had been threading the aisles of

acacia-trees, now glaring red, now azure, as the Bengal lights kept

changing. My mind instinctively went back to scenes of treachery and

bloodshed in the olden time, when Gorrado Trinci paraded the mangled

remnants of three hundred of his victims, heaped on mule-back, through

Foligno, for a warning to the citizens. As the procession moved along

the ramparts, I found myself in contest with a young man, who readily

fell into conversation. He was very tall, with enormous breadth of

shoulders, and long sinewy arms, like Michelangelo's favourite models.

His head was small, curled over with crisp black hair. Low forehead,

and thick level eyebrows absolutely meeting over intensely bright

fierce eyes. The nose descending straight from the brows, as in a

statue of Hadrian's age. The mouth full-lipped, petulant, and

passionate above a firm round chin. He was dressed in the shirt, white

trousers, and loose white jacket of a contadino; but he did not move

with a peasant's slouch, rather with the elasticity and alertness of

an untamed panther. He told me that he was just about to join a

cavalry regiment; and I could well imagine, when military dignity was

added to that gait, how grandly he would go. This young man, of whom I

heard nothing more after our half-hour's conversation among the

crackling fireworks and roaring cannon, left upon my mind an

indescribable impression of dangerousness--of 'something fierce and

terrible, eligible to burst forth.' Of men like this, then, were

formed the Companies of Adventure who flooded Italy with villany,

ambition, and lawlessness in the fifteenth century. Gattamelata, who

began life as a baker's boy at Narni and ended it with a bronze statue

by Donatello on the public square in Padua, was of this breed. Like

this were the Trinci and their bands of murderers. Like this were the

bravi who hunted Lorenzaccio to death at Venice. Like this was Pietro

Paolo Baglioni, whose fault, in the eyes of Machiavelli, was that he

could not succeed in being 'perfettamente tristo.' Beautiful, but

inhuman; passionate, but cold; powerful, but rendered impotent for

firm and lofty deeds by immorality and treason; how many centuries of

men like this once wasted Italy and plunged her into servitude! Yet

what material is here, under sterner discipline, and with a nobler

national ideal, for the formation of heroic armies. Of such stuff,

doubtless, were the Roman legionaries. When will the Italians learn to

use these men as Fabius or as Cæsar, not as the Vitelli and the Trinci

used them? In such meditations, deeply stirred by the meeting of my

own reflections with one who seemed to represent for me in life and

blood the spirit of the place which had provoked them, I said farewell

to Cavallucci, and returned to my bedroom on the city wall. The last

rockets had whizzed and the last cannons had thundered ere I fell

asleep.

SPELLO

Spello contains some not inconsiderable antiquities--the remains of a

Roman theatre, a Roman gate with the heads of two men and a woman

leaning over it, and some fragments of Roman sculpture scattered

through its buildings. The churches, especially those of S.M. Maggiore

and S. Francesco, are worth a visit for the sake of Pinturicchio.

Nowhere, except in the Piccolomini Library at Siena, can that master's

work in fresco be better studied than here. The satisfaction with

which he executed the wall paintings in S. Maria Maggiore is testified

by his own portrait introduced upon a panel in the decoration of the

Virgin's chamber. The scrupulously rendered details of books, chairs,

window seats, &c., which he here has copied, remind one of Carpaccio's

study of S. Benedict at Venice. It is all sweet, tender, delicate, and

carefully finished; but without depth, not even the depth of

Perugino's feeling. In S. Francesco, Pinturicchio, with the same

meticulous refinement, painted a letter addressed to him by Gentile

Baglioni. It lies on a stool before Madonna and her court of saints.

Nicety of execution, technical mastery of fresco as a medium for Dutch

detail-painting, prettiness of composition, and cheerfulness of

colouring, are noticeable throughout his work here rather than either

thought or sentiment. S. Maria Maggiore can boast a fresco of Madonna

between a young episcopal saint and Catherine of Alexandria from the

hand of Perugino. The rich yellow harmony of its tones, and the

graceful dignity of its emotion, conveyed no less by a certain

Raphaelesque pose and outline than by suavity of facial expression,

enable us to measure the distance between this painter and his

quasi-pupil Pinturicchio.

We did not, however, drive to Spello to inspect either Roman

antiquities or frescoes, but to see an inscription on the city walls

about Orlando. It is a rude Latin elegiac couplet, saying that, 'from

the sign below, men may conjecture the mighty members of Roland,

nephew of Charles; his deeds are written in history.' Three agreeable

old gentlemen of Spello, who attended us with much politeness, and

were greatly interested in my researches, pointed out a mark

waist-high upon the wall, where Orlando's knee is reported to have

reached. But I could not learn anything about a phallic monolith,

which is said by Guerin or Panizzi to have been identified with the

Roland myth at Spello. Such a column either never existed here, or

had been removed before the memory of the present generation.

EASTER MORNING AT ASSISI

We are in the lower church of S. Francesco. High mass is being sung,

with orchestra and organ and a choir of many voices. Candles are

lighted on the altar, over-canopied with Giotto's allegories. From the

low southern windows slants the sun, in narrow bands, upon the

many-coloured gloom and embrowned glory of these painted aisles. Women

in bright kerchiefs kneel upon the stones, and shaggy men from the

mountains stand or lean against the wooden benches. There is no moving

from point to point. Where we have taken our station, at the

north-western angle of the transept, there we stay till mass be over.

The whole low-vaulted building glows duskily; the frescoed roof, the

stained windows, the figure-crowded pavements blending their rich but

subdued colours, like hues upon some marvellous moth's wings, or like

a deep-toned rainbow mist discerned in twilight dreams, or like such

tapestry as Eastern queens, in ancient days, wrought for the pavilion

of an empress. Forth from this maze of mingling tints, indefinite in

shade and sunbeams, lean earnest, saintly faces--ineffably

pure--adoring, pitying, pleading; raising their eyes in ecstasy to

heaven, or turning them in ruth toward earth. Men and women of whom

the world was not worthy--at the hands of those old painters they have

received the divine grace, the dovelike simplicity, whereof Italians

in the fourteenth century possessed the irrecoverable secret. Each

face is a poem; the counterpart in painting to a chapter from the

Fioretti di San Francesco. Over the whole scene--in the architecture,

in the frescoes, in the coloured windows, in the gloom, on the

people, in the incense, from the chiming bells, through the

music--broods one spirit: the spirit of him who was 'the co-espoused,

co-transforate with Christ;' the ardent, the radiant, the beautiful in

soul; the suffering, the strong, the simple, the victorious over self

and sin; the celestial who trampled upon earth and rose on wings of

ecstasy to heaven; the Christ-inebriated saint of visions supersensual

and life beyond the grave. Far down below the feet of those who

worship God through him, S. Francis sleeps; but his soul, the

incorruptible part of him, the message he gave the world, is in the

spaces round us. This is his temple. He fills it like an unseen god.

Not as Phoebus or Athene, from their marble pedestals; but as an

abiding spirit, felt everywhere, nowhere seized, absorbing in itself

all mysteries, all myths, all burning exaltations, all abasements, all

love, self-sacrifice, pain, yearning, which the thought of Christ,

sweeping the centuries, hath wrought for men. Let, therefore, choir

and congregation raise their voices on the tide of prayers and

praises; for this is Easter morning--Christ is risen! Our sister,

Death of the Body, for whom S. Francis thanked God in his hymn, is

reconciled to us this day, and takes us by the hand, and leads us to

the gate whence floods of heavenly glory issue from the faces of a

multitude of saints. Pray, ye poor people; chant and pray. If all be

but a dream, to wake from this were loss for you indeed!

PERUSIA AUGUSTA

The piazza in front of the Prefettura is my favourite resort on these

nights of full moon. The evening twilight is made up partly of sunset

fading over Thrasymene and Tuscany; partly of moonrise from the

mountains of Gubbio and the passes toward Ancona. The hills are capped

with snow, although the season is so forward. Below our parapets the

bulk of S. Domenico, with its gaunt perforated tower, and the finer

group of S. Pietro, flaunting the arrowy 'Pennacchio di Perugia,' jut

out upon the spine of hill which dominates the valley of the Tiber. As

the night gloom deepens, and the moon ascends the sky, these buildings

seem to form the sombre foreground to some French etching. Beyond them

spreads the misty moon-irradiated plain of Umbria. Over all rise

shadowy Apennines, with dim suggestions of Assisi, Spello, Foligno,

Montefalco, and Spoleto on their basements. Little thin whiffs of

breezes, very slight and searching, flit across, and shiver as they

pass from Apennine to plain. The slowly moving population--women in

veils, men winter-mantled--pass to and fro between the buildings and

the grey immensity of sky. Bells ring. The bugles of the soldiers blow

retreat in convents turned to barracks. Young men roam the streets

beneath, singing May songs. Far, far away upon the plain, red through

the vitreous moonlight ringed with thundery gauze, fires of unnamed

castelli smoulder. As we lean from ledges eighty feet in height, gas

vies with moon in chequering illuminations on the ancient walls;

Etruscan mouldings, Roman letters, high-piled hovels, suburban

world-old dwellings plastered like martins' nests against the masonry.

Sunlight adds more of detail to this scene. To the right of Subasio,

where the passes go from Foligno towards Urbino and Ancona, heavy

masses of thundercloud hang every day; but the plain and

hill-buttresses are clear in transparent blueness. First comes Assisi,

with S.M. degli Angeli below; then Spello; then Foligno; then Trevi;

and, far away, Spoleto; with, reared against those misty battlements,

the village height of Montefalco--the 'ringhiera dell' Umbria,' as

they call it in this country. By daylight, the snow on yonder peaks is

clearly visible, where the Monti della Sibilla tower up above the

sources of the Nera and Velino from frigid wastes of Norcia. The lower

ranges seem as though painted, in films of airiest and palest azure,

upon china; and then comes the broad green champaign, flecked with

villages and farms. Just at the basement of Perugia winds Tiber,

through sallows and grey poplar-trees, spanned by ancient arches of

red brick, and guarded here and there by castellated towers. The mills

beneath their dams and weirs are just as Raphael drew them; and the

feeling of air and space reminds one, on each coign of vantage, of

some Umbrian picture. Every hedgerow is hoary with May-bloom and

honeysuckle. The oaks hang out their golden-dusted tassels. Wayside

shrines are decked with laburnum boughs and iris blossoms plucked from

the copse-woods, where spires of purple and pink orchis variegate the

thin, fine grass. The land waves far and wide with young corn, emerald

green beneath the olive-trees, which take upon their under-foliage

tints reflected from this verdure or red tones from the naked earth. A

fine race of _contadini_, with large, heroically graceful forms, and

beautiful dark eyes and noble faces, move about this garden, intent on

ancient, easy tillage of the kind Saturnian soil.

LA MAGIONE

On the road from Perugia to Cortona, the first stage ends at La

Magione, a high hill-village commanding the passage from the Umbrian

champaign to the lake of Thrasymene.

It has a grim square fortalice above it, now in ruins, and a stately

castle to the south-east, built about the time of Braccio. Here took

place that famous diet of Cesare Borgia's enemies, when the son of

Alexander VI. was threatening Bologna with his arms, and bidding fair

to make himself supreme tyrant of Italy in 1502. It was the policy of

Cesare to fortify himself by reducing the fiefs of the Church to

submission, and by rooting out the dynasties which had acquired a

sort of tyranny in Papal cities. The Varani of Camerino and the

Manfredi of Faenza had been already extirpated. There was only too

good reason to believe that the turn of the Vitelli at Città di

Castello, of the Baglioni at Perugia, and of the Bentivogli at Bologna

would come next. Pandolfo Petrucci at Siena, surrounded on all sides

by Cesare's conquests, and specially menaced by the fortification of

Piombino, felt himself in danger. The great house of the Orsini, who

swayed a large part of the Patrimony of S. Peter's, and were closely

allied to the Vitelli, had even graver cause for anxiety. But such was

the system of Italian warfare, that nearly all these noble families

lived by the profession of arms, and most of them were in the pay of

Cesare. When, therefore, the conspirators met at La Magione, they were

plotting against a man whose money they had taken, and whom they had

hitherto aided in his career of fraud and spoliation.

The diet consisted of the Cardinal Orsini, an avowed antagonist of

Alexander VI.; his brother Paolo, the chieftain of the clan;

Vitellozzo Vitelli, lord of Città di Castello; Gian-Paolo Baglioni,

made undisputed master of Perugia by the recent failure of his cousin

Grifonetto's treason; Oliverotto, who had just acquired the March of

Fermo by the murder of his uncle Giovanni da Fogliani; Ermes

Bentivoglio, the heir of Bologna; and Antonio da Venafro, the

secretary of Pandolfo Petrueci. These men vowed hostility on the basis

of common injuries and common fear against the Borgia. But they were

for the most part stained themselves with crime, and dared not trust

each other, and could not gain the confidence of any respectable power

in Italy except the exiled Duke of Urbino. Procrastination was the

first weapon used by the wily Cesare, who trusted that time would sow

among his rebel captains suspicion and dissension. He next made

overtures to the leaders separately, and so far succeeded in his

perfidious policy as to draw Vitellozzo Vitelli, Oliverotto da Fermo,

Paolo Orsini, and Francesco Orsini, Duke of Gravina, into his nets at

Sinigaglia. Under pretext of fair conference and equitable settlement

of disputed claims, he possessed himself of their persons, and had

them strangled--two upon December 31, and two upon January 18, 1503.

Of all Cesare's actions, this was the most splendid for its successful

combination of sagacity and policy in the hour of peril, of persuasive

diplomacy, and of ruthless decision when the time to strike his blow

arrived.

CORTONA

After leaving La Magione, the road descends upon the lake of

Thrasymene through oak-woods full of nightingales. The lake lay

basking, leaden-coloured, smooth and waveless, under a misty,

rain-charged, sun-irradiated sky. At Passignano, close beside its

shore, we stopped for mid-day. This is a little fishing village of

very poor people, who live entirely by labour on the waters. They

showed us huge eels coiled in tanks, and some fine specimens of the

silver carp--Reina del Lago. It was off one of the eels that we made

our lunch; and taken, as he was, alive from his cool lodging, he

furnished a series of dishes fit for a king.

Climbing the hill of Cortona seemed a quite interminable business. It

poured a deluge. Our horses were tired, and one lean donkey, who,

after much trouble, was produced from a farmhouse and yoked in front

of them, rendered but little assistance.

Next day we duly saw the Muse and Lamp in the Museo, the Fra

Angelicos, and all the Signorellis. One cannot help thinking that too

much fuss is made nowadays about works of art--running after them for

their own sakes, exaggerating their importance, and detaching them as

objects of study, instead of taking them with sympathy and

carelessness as pleasant or instructive adjuncts to our actual life.

Artists, historians of art, and critics are forced to isolate

pictures; and it is of profit to their souls to do so. But simple

folk, who have no aesthetic vocation, whether creative or critical,

suffer more than is good for them by compliance with mere fashion.

Sooner or later we shall return to the spirit of the ages which

produced these pictures, and which regarded them with less of an

industrious bewilderment than they evoke at present.

I am far indeed from wishing to decry art, the study of art, or the

benefits to be derived from its intelligent enjoyment. I only mean to

suggest that we go the wrong way to work at present in this matter.

Picture and sculpture galleries accustom us to the separation of art

from life. Our methods of studying art, making a beginning of

art-study while traveling, tend to perpetuate this separation. It is

only on reflection, after long experience, that we come to perceive

that the most fruitful moments in our art education have been casual

and unsought, in quaint nooks and unexpected places, where nature,

art, and life are happily blent.

The Palace of the Commune at Cortona is interesting because of the

shields of Florentine governors, sculptured on blocks of grey stone,

and inserted in its outer walls--Peruzzi, Albizzi, Strozzi, Salviati,

among the more ancient--de' Medici at a later epoch. The revolutions

in the Republic of Florence may be read by a herald from these

coats-of-arms and the dates beneath them.

The landscape of this Tuscan highland satisfies me more and more with

sense of breadth and beauty. From S. Margherita above the town the

prospect is immense and wonderful and wild--up into those brown,

forbidding mountains; down to the vast plain; and over to the cities

of Chiusi, Montepulciano, and Foiano. The jewel of the view is

Trasimeno, a silvery shield encased with serried hills, and set upon

one corner of the scene, like a precious thing apart and meant for

separate contemplation. There is something in the singularity and

circumscribed completeness of the mountain-girded lake, diminished by

distance, which would have attracted Lionardo da Vinci's pencil, had

he seen it.

Cortona seems desperately poor, and the beggars are intolerable. One

little blind boy, led by his brother, both frightfully ugly and ragged

urchins, pursued us all over the city, incessantly whining 'Signore

Padrone!' It was only on the threshold of the inn that I ventured to

give them a few coppers, for I knew well that any public beneficence

would raise the whole swarm of the begging population round us.

Sitting later in the day upon the piazza of S. Domenico, I saw the

same blind boy taken by his brother to play. The game consists, in the

little creature throwing his arms about the trunk of a big tree, and

running round and round it, clasping it. This seemed to make him quite

inexpressibly happy. His face lit up and beamed with that inner

beatitude blind people show--a kind of rapture shining over it, as

though nothing could be more altogether delightful. This little boy

had the smallpox at eight months, and has never been able to see

since. He looks sturdy, and may live to be of any age--doomed always,

is that possible, to beg?

CHIUSI

What more enjoyable dinner can be imagined than a flask of excellent

Montepulciano, a well-cooked steak, and a little goat's cheese in the

inn of the Leone d'Oro at Chiusi? The windows are open, and the sun is

setting. Monte Cetona bounds the view to the right, and the wooded

hills of Città della Pieve to the left. The deep green dimpled valley

goes stretching away toward Orvieto; and at its end a purple mountain

mass, distinct and solitary, which may peradventure be Soracte! The

near country is broken into undulating hills, forested with fine

olives and oaks; and the composition of the landscape, with its

crowning villages, is worthy of a background to an Umbrian picture.

The breadth and depth and quiet which those painters loved, the space

of lucid sky, the suggestion of winding waters in verdant fields, all

are here. The evening is beautiful--golden light streaming softly from

behind us on this prospect, and gradually mellowing to violet and blue

with stars above.

At Chiusi we visited several Etruscan tombs, and saw their red and

black scrawled pictures. One of the sepulchres was a well-jointed

vault of stone with no wall-paintings. The rest had been scooped out

of the living tufa. This was the excuse for some pleasant hours spent

in walking and driving through the country. Chiusi means for me the

mingling of grey olives and green oaks in limpid sunlight; deep leafy

lanes; warm sandstone banks; copses with nightingales and cyclamens

and cuckoos; glimpses of a silvery lake; blue shadowy distances; the

bristling ridge of Monte Cetona; the conical towers, Becca di Questo

and Becca di Quello, over against each other on the borders; ways

winding among hedgerows like some bit of England in June, but not so

full of flowers. It means all this, I fear, for me far more than

theories about Lars Porsenna and Etruscan ethnology.

GUBBIO

Gubbio ranks among the most ancient of Italian hill-towns. With its

back set firm against the spine of central Apennines, and piled, house

over house, upon the rising slope, it commands a rich tract of upland

champaign, bounded southward toward Perugia and Foligno by peaked and

rolling ridges. This amphitheatre, which forms its source of wealth

and independence, is admirably protected by a chain of natural

defences; and Gubbio wears a singularly old-world aspect of antiquity

and isolation. Houses climb right to the crests of gaunt bare peaks;

and the brown mediæval walls with square towers which protected them

upon the mountain side, following the inequalities of the ground, are

still a marked feature in the landscape. It is a town of steep streets

and staircases, with quaintly framed prospects, and solemn vistas

opening at every turn across the lowland. One of these views might be

selected for especial notice. In front, irregular buildings losing

themselves in country as they straggle by the roadside; then the open

post-road with a cypress to the right; afterwards, the rich green

fields, and on a bit of rising ground an ancient farmhouse with its

brown dependencies; lastly, the blue hills above Fossato, and far away

a wrack of tumbling clouds. All this enclosed by the heavy archway of

the Porta Romana, where sunlight and shadow chequer the mellow tones

of a dim fresco, indistinct with age, but beautiful.

Gubbio has not greatly altered since the middle ages. But poor people

are now living in the palaces of noblemen and merchants. These new

inhabitants have walled up the fair arched windows and slender portals

of the ancient dwellers, spoiling the beauty of the streets without

materially changing the architectural masses. In that witching hour

when the Italian sunset has faded, and a solemn grey replaces the

glowing tones of daffodil and rose, it is not difficult, here dreaming

by oneself alone, to picture the old noble life--the ladies moving

along those open loggias, the young men in plumed caps and curling

hair with one foot on those doorsteps, the knights in armour and the

sumpter mules and red-robed Cardinals defiling through those gates

into the courts within. The modern bricks and mortar with which that

picturesque scene has been overlaid, the ugly oblong windows and

bright green shutters which now interrupt the flowing lines of arch

and gallery; these disappear beneath the fine remembered touch of a

sonnet sung by Folgore, when still the Parties had their day, and this

deserted city was the centre of great aims and throbbing aspirations.

The names of the chief buildings in Gubbio are strongly suggestive of

the middle ages. They abut upon a Piazza de' Signori. One of them, the

Palazzo del Municipio, is a shapeless unfinished block of masonry. It

is here that the Eugubine tables, plates of brass with Umbrian and

Roman incised characters, are shown. The Palazzo de' Consoli has

higher architectural qualities, and is indeed unique among Italian

palaces for the combination of massiveness with lightness in a

situation of unprecedented boldness. Rising from enormous

substructures mortised into the solid hillside, it rears its vast

rectangular bulk to a giddy height above the town; airy loggias

imposed on great forbidding masses of brown stone, shooting aloft into

a light aërial tower. The empty halls inside are of fair proportions

and a noble size, and the views from the open colonnades in all

directions fascinate. But the final impression made by the building is

one of square, tranquil, massive strength--perpetuity embodied in

masonry--force suggesting facility by daring and successful addition

of elegance to hugeness. Vast as it is, this pile is not forbidding,

as a similarly weighty structure in the North would be. The fine

quality of the stone and the delicate though simple mouldings of the

windows give it an Italian grace.

These public palaces belong to the age of the Communes, when Gubbio

was a free town, with a policy of its own, and an important part to

play in the internecine struggles of Pope and Empire, Guelf and

Ghibelline. The ruined, deserted, degraded Palazzo Ducale reminds us

of the advent of the despots. It has been stripped of all its

tarsia-work and sculpture. Only here and there a Fe.D., with the

cupping-glass of Federigo di Montefeltro, remains to show that Gubbio

once became the fairest fief of the Urbino duchy. S. Ubaldo, who gave

his name to this duke's son, was the patron of Gubbio, and to him the

cathedral is dedicated--one low enormous vault, like a cellar or

feudal banqueting hall, roofed with a succession of solid Gothic

arches. This strange old church, and the House of Canons, buttressed

on the hill beside it, have suffered less from modernisation than most

buildings in Gubbio. The latter, in particular, helps one to

understand what this city of grave palazzi must have been, and how the

mere opening of old doors and windows would restore it to its

primitive appearance. The House of the Canons has, in fact, not yet

been given over to the use of middle-class and proletariate.

At the end of a day in Gubbio, it is pleasant to take our ease in the

primitive hostelry, at the back of which foams a mountain-torrent,

rushing downward from the Apennines. The Gubbio wine is very fragrant,

and of a rich ruby colour. Those to whom the tints of wine and jewels

give a pleasure not entirely childish, will take delight in its

specific blending of tawny hues with rose. They serve the table still,

at Gubbio, after the antique Italian fashion, covering it with a

cream-coloured linen cloth bordered with coarse lace--the creases of

the press, the scent of old herbs from the wardrobe, are still upon

it--and the board is set with shallow dishes of warm, white

earthenware, basket-worked in open lattice at the edge, which contain

little separate messes of meat, vegetables, cheese, and comfits. The

wine stands in strange, slender phials of smooth glass, with stoppers;

and the amber-coloured bread lies in fair round loaves upon the cloth.

Dining thus is like sitting down to the supper at Emmaus, in some

picture of Gian Bellini or of Masolino. The very bareness of the

room--its open rafters, plastered walls, primitive settees, and

red-brick floor, on which a dog sits waiting for a bone--enhances the

impression of artistic delicacy in the table.

FROM GUBBIO TO FANO

The road from Gubbio, immediately after leaving the city, enters a

narrow Alpine ravine, where a thin stream dashes over dark, red rocks,

and pendent saxifrages wave to the winds. The carriage in which we

travelled at the end of May, one morning, had two horses, which our

driver soon supplemented with a couple of white oxen. Slowly and

toilsomely we ascended between the flanks of barren hills--gaunt

masses of crimson and grey crag, clothed at their summits with short

turf and scanty pasture. The pass leads first to the little town of

Scheggia, and is called the Monte Calvo, or bald mountain. At

Scheggia, it joins the great Flaminian Way, or North road of the Roman

armies. At the top there is a fine view over the conical hills that

dominate Gubbio, and, far away, to noble mountains above the Furlo and

the Foligno line of railway to Ancona. Range rises over range,

crossing at unexpected angles, breaking into sudden precipices, and

stretching out long, exquisitely modelled outlines, as only Apennines

can do, in silvery sobriety of colours toned by clearest air. Every

square piece of this austere, wild landscape forms a varied picture,

whereof the composition is due to subtle arrangements of lines always

delicate; and these lines seem somehow to have been determined in

their beauty by the vast antiquity of the mountain system, as though

they all had taken time to choose their place and wear down into

harmony. The effect of tempered sadness was heightened for us by

stormy lights and dun clouds, high in air, rolling vapours and flying

shadows, over all the prospect, tinted in ethereal grisaille.

After Scheggia, one enters a land of meadow and oak-trees. This is the

sacred central tract of Jupiter Apenninus, whose fane--

Delubra Jovis saxoque minantes

Apenninigenis cultae pastoribus arae

--once rose behind us on the bald Iguvian summits. A second little

pass leads from this region to the Adriatic side of the Italian

watershed, and the road now follows the Barano downward toward the

sea. The valley is fairly green with woods, where mistletoe may here

and there be seen on boughs of oak, and rich with cornfields. Cagli is

the chief town of the district, and here they show one of the best

pictures left to us by Raphael's father, Giovanni Santi. It is a

Madonna, attended by S. Peter, S. Francis, S. Dominic, S. John, and

two angels. One of the angels is traditionally supposed to have been

painted from the boy Raphael, and the face has something which reminds

us of his portraits. The whole composition, excellent in modelling,

harmonious in grouping, soberly but strongly coloured, with a peculiar

blending of dignity and sweetness, grace and vigour, makes one wonder

why Santi thought it necessary to send his son from his own workshop

to study under Perugino. He was himself a master of his art, and this,

perhaps the most agreeable of his paintings, has a masculine sincerity

which is absent from at least the later works of Perugino.

Some miles beyond Cagli, the real pass of the Furlo begins. It owes

its name to a narrow tunnel bored by Vespasian in the solid rock,

where limestone crags descend on the Barano. The Romans called this

gallery Petra Pertusa, or Intercisa, or more familiarly Forulus,

whence comes the modern name. Indeed, the stations on the old

Flaminian Way are still well marked by Latin designations; for Cagli

is the ancient Calles, and Fossombrone is Forum Sempronii, and Fano

the Fanum Fortunæ. Vespasian commemorated this early achievement in

engineering by an inscription carved on the living stone, which still

remains; and Claudian, when he sang the journey of his Emperor

Honorius from Rimini to Rome, speaks thus of what was even then an

object of astonishment to travellers:--

Laetior hinc fano recipit fortuna vetusto,

Despiciturque vagus praerupta valle Metaurus,

Qua mons arte patens vivo se perforat arcu

Admittitque viam sectae per viscera rupis.

The Forulus itself may now be matched, on any Alpine pass, by several

tunnels of far mightier dimensions; for it is narrow, and does not

extend more than 126 feet in length. But it occupies a fine position

at the end of a really imposing ravine. The whole Furlo Pass might,

without too much exaggeration, be described as a kind of Cheddar on

the scale of the Via Mala. The limestone rocks, which rise on either

hand above the gorge to an enormous height, are noble in form and

solemn, like a succession of gigantic portals, with stupendous

flanking obelisks and pyramids. Some of these crag-masses rival the

fantastic cliffs of Capri, and all consist of that southern mountain

limestone which changes from pale yellow to blue grey and dusky

orange. A river roars precipitately through the pass, and the

roadsides wave with many sorts of campanulas--a profusion of azure and

purple bells upon the hard white stone. Of Roman remains there is

still enough (in the way of Roman bridges and bits of broken masonry)

to please an antiquary's eye. But the lover of nature will dwell

chiefly on the picturesque qualities of this historic gorge, so alien

to the general character of Italian scenery, and yet so remote from

anything to which Swiss travelling accustoms one.

The Furlo breaks out into a richer land of mighty oaks and waving

cornfields, a fat pastoral country, not unlike Devonshire in detail,

with green uplands, and wild-rose tangled hedgerows, and much running

water, and abundance of summer flowers. At a point above Fossombrone,

the Barano joins the Metauro, and here one has a glimpse of faraway

Urbino, high upon its mountain eyrie. It is so rare, in spite of

immemorial belief, to find in Italy a wilderness of wild flowers, that

I feel inclined to make a list of those I saw from our carriage

windows as we rolled down lazily along the road to Fossombrone. Broom,

and cytisus, and hawthorn mingled with roses, gladiolus, and sainfoin.

There were orchises, and clematis, and privet, and wild-vine, vetches

of all hues, red poppies, sky-blue cornflowers, and lilac pimpernel.

In the rougher hedges, dogwood, honeysuckle, pyracanth, and acacia

made a network of white bloom and blushes. Milk-worts of all bright

and tender tints combined with borage, iris, hawkweeds, harebells,

crimson clover, thyme, red snap-dragon, golden asters, and dreamy

love-in-a-mist, to weave a marvellous carpet such as the looms of

Shiraz or of Cashmere never spread. Rarely have I gazed on Flora in

such riot, such luxuriance, such self-abandonment to joy. The air was

filled with fragrances. Songs of cuckoos and nightingales echoed from

the copses on the hillsides. The sun was out, and dancing over all the

landscape.

After all this, Fano was very restful in the quiet sunset. It has a

sandy stretch of shore, on which the long, green-yellow rollers of the

Adriatic broke into creamy foam, beneath the waning saffron light over

Pesaro and the rosy rising of a full moon. This Adriatic sea carries

an English mind home to many a little watering-place upon our coast.

In colour and the shape of waves it resembles our Channel.

The sea-shore is Fano's great attraction; but the town has many

churches, and some creditable pictures, as well as Roman antiquities.

Giovanni Santi may here be seen almost as well as at Cagli; and of

Perugino there is one truly magnificent altar-piece--lunette, great

centre panel, and predella--dusty in its present condition, but

splendidly painted, and happily not yet restored or cleaned. It is

worth journeying to Fano to see this. Still better would the journey

be worth the traveller's while if he could be sure to witness such a

game of _Pallone_ as we chanced upon in the Via dell' Arco di

Augusto--lads and grown-men, tightly girt, in shirt sleeves, driving

the great ball aloft into the air with cunning bias and calculation of

projecting house-eaves. I do not understand the game; but it was

clearly played something after the manner of our football, that is to

say; with sides, and front and back players so arranged as to cover

the greatest number of angles of incidence on either wall.

Fano still remembers that it is the Fane of Fortune. On the fountain

in the market-place stands a bronze Fortuna, slim and airy, offering

her veil to catch the wind. May she long shower health and prosperity

upon the modern watering-place of which she is the patron saint!

* * * * *

_THE PALACE OF URBINO_

I

At Rimini, one spring, the impulse came upon my wife and me to make

our way across San Marino to Urbino. In the Piazza, called

apocryphally after Julius Cæsar, I found a proper _vetturino_, with a

good carriage and two indefatigable horses. He was a splendid fellow,

and bore a great historic name, as I discovered when our bargain was

completed. 'What are you called?' I asked him. '_Filippo Visconti, per

servirla!_' was the prompt reply. Brimming over with the darkest

memories of the Italian Renaissance, I hesitated when I heard this

answer. The associations seemed too ominous. And yet the man himself

was so attractive--tall, stalwart, and well looking--no feature of his

face or limb of his athletic form recalling the gross tyrant who

concealed worse than Caligula's ugliness from sight in secret

chambers--that I shook this preconception from my mind. As it turned

out, Filippo Visconti had nothing in common with his infamous namesake

but the name. On a long and trying journey, he showed neither sullen

nor yet ferocious tempers; nor, at the end of it, did he attempt by

any master-stroke of craft to wheedle from me more than his fair pay;

but took the meerschaum pipe I gave him for a keepsake, with the frank

goodwill of an accomplished gentleman. The only exhibition of his hot

Italian blood which I remember did his humanity credit.

While we were ascending a steep hillside, he jumped from his box to

thrash a ruffian by the roadside for brutal treatment to a little boy.

He broke his whip, it is true, in this encounter; risked a dangerous

quarrel; and left his carriage, with myself and wife inside it, to the

mercy of his horses in a somewhat perilous position. But when he came

back, hot and glowing, from this deed of justice, I could only applaud

his zeal.

An Italian of this type, handsome as an antique statue, with the

refinement of a modern gentleman and that intelligence which is innate

in a race of immemorial culture, is a fascinating being. He may be

absolutely ignorant in all book-learning. He may be as ignorant as a

Bersagliere from Montalcino with whom I once conversed at Rimini, who

gravely said that he could walk in three months to North America, and

thought of doing it when his term of service was accomplished. But he

will display, as this young soldier did, a grace and ease of address

which are rare in London drawing-rooms; and by his shrewd remarks upon

the cities he has visited, will show that he possesses a fine natural

taste for things of beauty. The speech of such men, drawn from the

common stock of the Italian people, is seasoned with proverbial

sayings, the wisdom of centuries condensed in a few nervous words.

When emotion fires their brain, they break into spontaneous eloquence,

or suggest the motive of a poem by phrases pregnant with imagery.

For the first stage of the journey out of Rimini, Filippo's two horses

sufficed. The road led almost straight across the level between

quickset hedges in white bloom. But when we reached the long steep

hill which ascends to San Marino, the inevitable oxen were called out,

and we toiled upwards leisurely through cornfields bright with red

anemones and sweet narcissus. At this point pomegranate hedges

replaced the May-thorns of the plain. In course of time our _bovi_

brought us to the Borgo, or lower town, whence there is a further

ascent of seven hundred feet to the topmost hawk's-nest or acropolis

of the republic. These we climbed on foot, watching the view expand

around us and beneath. Crags of limestone here break down abruptly to

the rolling hills, which go to lose themselves in field and shore.

Misty reaches of the Adriatic close the world to eastward. Cesena,

Rimini, Verucchio, and countless hill-set villages, each isolated on

its tract of verdure conquered from the stern grey soil, define the

points where Montefeltri wrestled with Malatestas in long bygone

years. Around are marly mountain-flanks in wrinkles and gnarled

convolutions like some giant's brain, furrowed by rivers crawling

through dry wasteful beds of shingle. Interminable ranges of gaunt

Apennines stretch, tier by tier, beyond; and over all this landscape,

a grey-green mist of rising crops and new-fledged oak-trees lies like

a veil upon the nakedness of Nature's ruins.

Nothing in Europe conveys a more striking sense of geological

antiquity than such a prospect. The denudation and abrasion of

innumerable ages, wrought by slow persistent action of weather and

water on an upheaved mountain mass, are here made visible. Every wave

in that vast sea of hills, every furrow in their worn flanks, tells

its tale of a continuous corrosion still in progress. The dominant

impression is one of melancholy. We forget how Romans, countermarching

Carthaginians, trod the land beneath us. The marvel of San Marino,

retaining independence through the drums and tramplings of the last

seven centuries, is swallowed in a deeper sense of wonder. We turn

instinctively in thought to Leopardi's musings on man's destiny at war

with unknown nature-forces and malignant rulers of the universe.

Omai disprezza

Te, la natura, il brutto

Poter che, ascoso, a comun danno impera,

E l' infinita vanità del tutto.

And then, straining our eyes southward, we sweep the dim blue distance

for Recanati, and remember that the poet of modern despair and

discouragement was reared in even such a scene as this.

The town of San Marino is grey, narrow-streeted, simple; with a great,

new, decent, Greek-porticoed cathedral, dedicated to the eponymous

saint. A certain austerity defines it from more picturesque

hill-cities with a less uniform history. There is a marble statue of

S. Marino in the choir of his church; and in his cell is shown the

stone bed and pillow on which he took austere repose. One narrow

window near the saint's abode commands a proud but melancholy

landscape of distant hills and seaboard. To this, the great absorbing

charm of San Marino, our eyes instinctively, recurrently, take

flight. It is a landscape which by variety and beauty thralls

attention, but which by its interminable sameness might grow almost

overpowering. There is no relief. The gladness shed upon far humbler

Northern lands in May is ever absent here. The German word

_Gemüthlichkeit_, the English phrase 'a home of ancient peace,' are

here alike by art and nature untranslated into visibilities. And yet

(as we who gaze upon it thus are fain to think) if peradventure the

intolerable _ennui_ of this panorama should drive a citizen of San

Marino into out-lands, the same view would haunt him whithersoever he

went--the swallows of his native eyrie would shrill through his

sleep--he would yearn to breathe its fine keen air in winter, and to

watch its iris-hedges deck themselves with blue in spring;--like

Virgil's hero, dying, he would think of San Marino: _Aspicit, et

dulces moriens reminiscitur Argos_. Even a passing stranger may feel

the mingled fascination and oppression of this prospect--the monotony

which maddens, the charm which at a distance grows upon the mind,

environing it with memories.

Descending to the Borgo, we found that Filippo Visconti had ordered a

luncheon of excellent white bread, pigeons, and omelette, with the

best red muscat wine I ever drank, unless the sharp air of the hills

deceived my appetite. An Italian history of San Marino, including its

statutes, in three volumes, furnished intellectual food. But I confess

to having learned from these pages little else than this: first, that

the survival of the Commonwealth through all phases of European

politics had been semi-miraculous; secondly, that the most eminent San

Marinesi had been lawyers. It is possible on a hasty deduction from

these two propositions (to which, however, I am far from wishing to

commit myself), that the latter is a sufficient explanation of the

former.

From San Marino the road plunges at a break-neck pace. We are now in

the true Feltrian highlands, whence the Counts of Montefeltro issued

in the twelfth century. Yonder eyrie is San Leo, which formed the key

of entrance to the duchy of Urbino in campaigns fought many hundred

years ago. Perched on the crest of a precipitous rock, this fortress

looks as though it might defy all enemies but famine. And yet San Leo

was taken and re-taken by strategy and fraud, when Montefeltro,

Borgia, Malatesta, Rovere, contended for dominion in these valleys.

Yonder is Sta. Agata, the village to which Guidobaldo fled by night

when Valentino drove him from his dukedom. A little farther towers

Carpegna, where one branch of the Montefeltro house maintained a

countship through seven centuries, and only sold their fief to Rome in

1815. Monte Coppiolo lies behind, Pietra Rubia in front: two other

eagles' nests of the same brood. What a road it is!

It beats the tracks on Exmoor. The uphill and downhill of Devonshire

scorns compromise or mitigation by _détour_ and zigzag. But here

geography is on a scale so far more vast, and the roadway is so far

worse metalled than with us in England--knotty masses of talc and

nodes of sandstone cropping up at dangerous turnings--that only

Dante's words describe the journey:--

Vassi in Sanleo, e discendesi in Noli,

Montasi su Bismantova in cacume

Con esso i piè; ma qui convien ch' uom voli.

Of a truth, our horses seemed rather to fly than scramble up and down

these rugged precipices; Visconti cheerily animating them with the

brave spirit that was in him, and lending them his wary driver's help

of hand and voice at need.

We were soon upon a cornice-road between the mountains and the

Adriatic: following the curves of gulch and cleft ravine; winding

round ruined castles set on points of vantage; the sea-line high

above their grass-grown battlements, the shadow-dappled champaign

girdling their bastions mortised on the naked rock. Except for the

blue lights across the distance, and the ever-present sea, these

earthy Apennines would be too grim. Infinite air and this spare veil

of spring-tide greenery on field and forest soothe their sternness.

Two rivers, swollen by late rains, had to be forded. Through one of

these, the Foglia, bare-legged peasants led the way. The horses waded

to their bellies in the tawny water. Then more hills and vales; green

nooks with rippling corn-crops; secular oaks attired in golden

leafage. The clear afternoon air rang with the voices of a thousand

larks overhead. The whole world seemed quivering with light and

delicate ethereal sound. And yet my mind turned irresistibly to

thoughts of war, violence, and pillage. How often has this

intermediate land been fought over by Montefeltro and Brancaleoni, by

Borgia and Malatesta, by Medici and Della Rovere! Its _contadini_ are

robust men, almost statuesque in build, and beautiful of feature. No

wonder that the Princes of Urbino, with such materials to draw from,

sold their service and their troops to Florence, Rome, S. Mark, and

Milan. The bearing of these peasants is still soldierly and proud. Yet

they are not sullen or forbidding like the Sicilians, whose habits of

life, for the rest, much resemble theirs. The villages, there as here,

are few and far between, perched high on rocks, from which the folk

descend to till the ground and reap the harvest. But the southern

_brusquerie_ and brutality are absent from this district. The men have

something of the dignity and slow-eyed mildness of their own huge

oxen. As evening fell, more solemn Apennines upreared themselves to

southward. The Monte d'Asdrubale, Monte Nerone, and Monte Catria hove

into sight. At last, when light was dim, a tower rose above the

neighbouring ridge, a broken outline of some city barred the sky-line.

Urbino stood before us. Our long day's march was at an end.

The sunset was almost spent, and a four days' moon hung above the

western Apennines, when we took our first view of the palace. It is a

fancy-thralling work of wonder seen in that dim twilight; like some

castle reared by Atlante's magic for imprisonment of Ruggiero, or

palace sought in fairyland by Astolf winding his enchanted horn. Where

shall we find its like, combining, as it does, the buttressed

battlemented bulk of mediæval strongholds with the airy balconies,

suspended gardens, and fantastic turrets of Italian pleasure-houses?

This unique blending of the feudal past with the Renaissance spirit of

the time when it was built, connects it with the art of Ariosto--or

more exactly with Boiardo's epic. Duke Federigo planned his palace at

Urbino just at the moment when the Count of Scandiano had began to

chaunt his lays of Roland in the Castle of Ferrara. Chivalry,

transmuted by the Italian genius into something fanciful and quaint,

survived as a frail work of art. The men-at-arms of the Condottieri

still glittered in gilded hauberks. Their helmets waved with plumes

and bizarre crests. Their surcoats blazed with heraldries; their

velvet caps with medals bearing legendary emblems. The pomp and

circumstance of feudal war had not yet yielded to the cannon of the

Gascon or the Switzer's pike. The fatal age of foreign invasions had

not begun for Italy. Within a few years Charles VIII.'s holiday

excursion would reveal the internal rottenness and weakness of her

rival states, and the peninsula for half a century to come would be

drenched in the blood of Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, fighting for

her cities as their prey. But now Lorenzo de' Medici was still alive.

The famous policy which bears his name held Italy suspended for a

golden time in false tranquillity and independence. The princes who

shared his culture and his love of art were gradually passing into

modern noblemen, abandoning the savage feuds and passions of more

virile centuries, yielding to luxury and scholarly enjoyments. The

castles were becoming courts, and despotisms won by force were

settling into dynasties.

It was just at this epoch that Duke Federigo built his castle at

Urbino. One of the ablest and wealthiest Condottieri of his time, one

of the best instructed and humanest of Italian princes, he combined in

himself the qualities which mark that period of transition. And these

he impressed upon his dwelling-house, which looks backward to the

mediæval fortalice and forward to the modern palace. This makes it the

just embodiment in architecture of Italian romance, the perfect

analogue of the 'Orlando Innamorato.' By comparing it with the castle

of the Estes at Ferrara and the Palazzo del Te of the Gonzagas at

Mantua, we place it in its right position between mediæval and

Renaissance Italy, between the age when principalities arose upon the

ruins of commercial independence and the age when they became dynastic

under Spain.

The exigencies of the ground at his disposal forced Federigo to give

the building an irregular outline. The fine façade, with its embayed

_loggie_ and flanking turrets, is placed too close upon the city

ramparts for its due effect. We are obliged to cross the deep ravine

which separates it from a lower quarter of the town, and take our

station near the Oratory of S. Giovanni Battista, before we can

appreciate the beauty of its design, or the boldness of the group it

forms with the cathedral dome and tower and the square masses of

numerous out-buildings. Yet this peculiar position of the palace,

though baffling to a close observer of its details, is one of singular

advantage to the inhabitants. Set on the verge of Urbino's towering

eminence, it fronts a wave-tossed sea of vales and mountain summits

toward the rising and the setting sun. There is nothing but

illimitable air between the terraces and loggias of the Duchess's

apartments and the spreading pyramid of Monte Catria.

A nobler scene is nowhere swept from palace windows than this, which

Castiglione touched in a memorable passage at the end of his

'Cortegiano.' To one who in our day visits Urbino, it is singular how

the slight indications of this sketch, as in some silhouette, bring

back the antique life, and link the present with the past--a hint,

perhaps, for reticence in our descriptions. The gentlemen and ladies

of the court had spent a summer night in long debate on love, rising

to the height of mystical Platonic rapture on the lips of Bembo, when

one of them exclaimed, 'The day has broken!' 'He pointed to the light

which was beginning to enter by the fissures of the windows. Whereupon

we flung the casements wide upon that side of the palace which looks

toward the high peak of Monte Catria, and saw that a fair dawn of rosy

hue was born already in the eastern skies, and all the stars had

vanished except the sweet regent of the heaven of Venus, who holds the

borderlands of day and night; and from her sphere it seemed as though

a gentle wind were breathing, filling the air with eager freshness,

and waking among the numerous woods upon the neighbouring hills the

sweet-toned symphonies of joyous birds.'

II

The House of Montefeltro rose into importance early in the twelfth

century. Frederick Barbarossa erected their fief into a county in

1160. Supported by imperial favour, they began to exercise an

undefined authority over the district, which they afterwards converted

into a duchy. But, though Ghibelline for several generations, the

Montefeltri were too near neighbours of the Papal power to free

themselves from ecclesiastical vassalage. Therefore in 1216 they

sought and obtained the title of Vicars of the Church. Urbino

acknowledged them as semi-despots in their double capacity of Imperial

and Papal deputies. Cagli and Gubbio followed in the fourteenth

century. In the fifteenth, Castel Durante was acquired from the

Brancaleoni by warfare, and Fossombrone from the Malatestas by

purchase. Numerous fiefs and villages fell into their hands upon the

borders of Rimini in the course of a continued struggle with the House

of Malatesta: and when Fano and Pesaro were added at the opening of

the sixteenth century, the domain over which they ruled was a compact

territory, some forty miles square, between the Adriatic and the

Apennines. From the close of the thirteenth century they bore the

title of Counts of Urbino. The famous Conte Guido, whom Dante placed

among the fraudulent in hell, supported the honours of the house and

increased its power by his political action, at this epoch. But it was

not until the year 1443 that the Montefeltri acquired their ducal

title. This was conferred by Eugenius IV. upon Oddantonio, over whose

alleged crimes and indubitable assassination a veil of mystery still

hangs. He was the son of Count Guidantonio, and at his death the

Montefeltri of Urbino were extinct in the legitimate line. A natural

son of Guidantonio had been, however, recognised in his father's

lifetime, and married to Gentile, heiress of Mercatello. This was

Federigo, a youth of great promise, who succeeded his half-brother in

1444 as Count of Urbino. It was not until 1474 that the ducal title

was revived for him.

Duke Frederick was a prince remarkable among Italian despots for

private virtues and sober use of his hereditary power. He spent his

youth at Mantua, in that famous school of Vittorino da Feltre, where

the sons and daughters of the first Italian nobility received a model

education in humanities, good manners, and gentle physical

accomplishments. More than any of his fellow-students Frederick

profited by this rare scholar's discipline. On leaving school he

adopted the profession of arms, as it was then practised, and joined

the troop of the Condottiere Niccolò Piccinino. Young men of his own

rank, especially the younger sons and bastards of ruling families,

sought military service under captains of adventure. If they

succeeded they were sure to make money. The coffers of the Church and

the republics lay open to their not too scrupulous hands; the wealth

of Milan and Naples was squandered on them in retaining-fees and

salaries for active service. There was always the further possibility

of placing a coronet upon their brows before they died, if haply they

should wrest a town from their employers, or obtain the cession of a

province from a needy Pope. The neighbours of the Montefeltri in

Umbria, Romagna, and the Marches of Ancona were all of them

Condottieri. Malatestas of Rimini and Pesaro, Vitelli of Città di

Castello, Varani of Camerino, Baglioni of Perugia, to mention only a

few of the most eminent nobles, enrolled themselves under the banners

of plebeian adventurers like Piccinino and Sforza Attendolo. Though

their family connections gave them a certain advantage, the system was

essentially democratic. Gattamelata and Carmagnola sprang from

obscurity by personal address and courage to the command of armies.

Colleoni fought his way up from the grooms to princely station and the

_bâton_ of S. Mark. Francesco Sforza, whose father had begun life as a

tiller of the soil, seized the ducal crown of Milan, and founded a

house which ranked among the first in Europe.

It is not needful to follow Duke Frederick in his military career. We

may briefly remark that when he succeeded to Urbino by his brother's

death in 1444, he undertook generalship on a grand scale. His own

dominions supplied him with some of the best troops in Italy. He was

careful to secure the goodwill of his subjects by attending personally

to their interests, relieving them of imposts, and executing equal

justice. He gained the then unique reputation of an honest prince,

paternally disposed toward his dependents. Men flocked to his

standards willingly, and he was able to bring an important contingent

into any army. These advantages secured for him alliances with

Francesco Sforza, and brought him successively into connection with

Milan, Venice, Florence, the Church of Naples. As a tactician in the

field he held high rank among the generals of the age, and so

considerable were his engagements that he acquired great wealth in the

exercise of his profession. We find him at one time receiving 8000

ducats a month as war-pay from Naples, with a peace pension of 6000.

While Captain-General of the League, he drew for his own use in war

45,000 ducats of annual pay. Retaining-fees and pensions in the name

of past services swelled his income, the exact extent of which has

not, so far as I am aware, been estimated, but which must have made

him one of the richest of Italian princes. All this wealth he spent

upon his duchy, fortifying and beautifying its cities, drawing youths

of promise to his court, maintaining a great train of life, and

keeping his vassals in good-humour by the lightness of a rule which

contrasted favourably with the exactions of needier despots.

While fighting for the masters who offered him _condotta_ in the

complicated wars of Italy, Duke Frederick used his arms, when occasion

served, in his own quarrels. Many years of his life were spent in a

prolonged struggle with his neighbour Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta,

the bizarre and brilliant tyrant of Rimini, who committed the fatal

error of embroiling himself beyond all hope of pardon with the Church,

and who died discomfited in the duel with his warier antagonist.

Urbino profited by each mistake of Sigismondo, and the history of this

long desultory strife with Rimini is a history of gradual

aggrandisement and consolidation for the Montefeltrian duchy.

In 1459 Duke Frederick married his second wife, Battista, daughter of

Alessandro Sforza, Lord of Pesaro. Their portraits, painted by Piero

della Francesca, are to be seen in the Uffizzi at Florence. Some years

earlier, Frederick lost his right eye and had the bridge of his nose

broken in a jousting match outside the town-gate of Urbino. After this

accident, he preferred to be represented in profile--the profile so

well known to students of Italian art on medals and basreliefs. It was

not without medical aid and vows fulfilled by a mother's

self-sacrifice to death, if we may trust the diarists of Urbino, that

the ducal couple got an heir. In 1472, however, a son was born to

them, whom they christened Guido Paolo Ubaldo. He proved a youth of

excellent parts and noble nature--apt at study, perfect in all

chivalrous accomplishments. But he inherited some fatal physical

debility, and his life was marred with a constitutional disease, which

then received the name of gout, and which deprived him of the free use

of his limbs. After his father's death in 1482, Naples, Florence, and

Milan continued Frederick's war engagements to Guidobaldo. The prince

was but a boy of ten. Therefore these important _condotte_ must be

regarded as compliments and pledges for the future. They prove to what

a pitch Duke Frederick had raised the credit of his state and war

establishment. Seven years later, Guidobaldo married Elisabetta,

daughter of Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua. This union, though a

happy one, was never blessed with children; and in the certainty of

barrenness, the young Duke thought it prudent to adopt a nephew as

heir to his dominions. He had several sisters, one of whom, Giovanna,

had been married to a nephew of Sixtus IV., Giovanni della Rovere,

Lord of Sinigaglia and Prefect of Rome. They had a son, Francesco

Maria, who, after his adoption by Guidobaldo, spent his boyhood at

Urbino.

The last years of the fifteenth century were marked by the sudden rise

of Cesare Borgia to a power which threatened the liberties of Italy.

Acting as General for the Church, he carried his arms against the

petty tyrants of Romagna, whom he dispossessed and extirpated. His

next move was upon Camerino and Urbino. He first acquired Camerino,

having lulled Guidobaldo into false security by treacherous

professions of goodwill. Suddenly the Duke received intelligence that

the Borgia was marching on him over Cagli. This was in the middle of

June 1502. It is difficult to comprehend the state of weakness in

which Guidobaldo was surprised, or the panic which then seized him. He

made no efforts to rouse his subjects to resistance, but fled by night

with his nephew through rough mountain roads, leaving his capital and

palace to the marauder. Cesare Borgia took possession without striking

a blow, and removed the treasures of Urbino to the Vatican. His

occupation of the duchy was not undisturbed, however; for the people

rose in several places against him, proving that Guidobaldo had

yielded too hastily to alarm. By this time the fugitive was safe in

Mantua, whence he returned, and for a short time succeeded in

establishing himself again at Urbino. But he could not hold his own

against the Borgias, and in December, by a treaty, he resigned his

claims and retired to Venice, where he lived upon the bounty of S.

Mark. It must be said, in justice to the Duke, that his constitutional

debility rendered him unfit for active operations in the field.

Perhaps he could not have done better than thus to bend beneath the

storm.

The sudden death of Alexander VI. and the election of a Della Rovere

to the Papacy in 1503 changed Guidobaldo's prospects. Julius II. was

the sworn foe of the Borgias and the close kinsman of Urbino's heir.

It was therefore easy for the Duke to walk into his empty palace on

the hill, and to reinstate himself in the domains from which he had so

recently been ousted. The rest of his life was spent in the retirement

of his court, surrounded with the finest scholars and the noblest

gentlemen of Italy. The ill-health which debarred him from the active

pleasures and employments of his station, was borne with uniform

sweetness of temper and philosophy.

When he died, in 1508, his nephew, Francesco Maria della Rovere,

succeeded to the duchy, and once more made the palace of Urbino the

resort of men-at-arms and captains. He was a prince of very violent

temper: of its extravagance history has recorded three remarkable

examples. He murdered the Cardinal of Pavia with his own hand in the

streets of Ravenna; stabbed a lover of his sister to death at Urbino;

and in a council of war knocked Francesco Guicciardini down with a

blow of his fist. When the history of Italy came to be written,

Guicciardini was probably mindful of that insult, for he painted

Francesco Maria's character and conduct in dark colours. At the same

time this Duke of Urbino passed for one of the first generals of the

age. The greatest stain upon his memory is his behaviour in the year

1527, when, by dilatory conduct of the campaign in Lombardy, he

suffered the passage of Frundsberg's army unopposed, and afterwards

hesitated to relieve Rome from the horrors of the sack. He was the

last Italian Condottiere of the antique type; and the vices which

Machiavelli exposed in that bad system of mercenary warfare were

illustrated on these occasions. During his lifetime, the conditions of

Italy were so changed by Charles V.'s imperial settlement in 1530,

that the occupation of Condottiere ceased to have any meaning. Strozzi

and Farnesi, who afterwards followed this profession, enlisted in the

ranks of France or Spain, and won their laurels in Northern Europe.

While Leo X. held the Papal chair, the duchy of Urbino was for a while

wrested from the house of Della Rovere, and conferred upon Lorenzo de'

Medici. Francesco Maria made a better fight for his heritage than

Guidobaldo had done. Yet he could not successfully resist the power of

Rome. The Pope was ready to spend enormous sums of money on this petty

war; the Duke's purse was shorter, and the mercenary troops he was

obliged to use, proved worthless in the field. Spaniards, for the

most part, pitted against Spaniards, they suffered the campaigns to

degenerate into a guerilla warfare of pillage and reprisals. In 1517

the duchy was formally ceded to Lorenzo. But this Medici did not live

long to enjoy it, and his only child Catherine, the future Queen of

France, never exercised the rights which had devolved upon her by

inheritance. The shifting scene of Italy beheld Francesco Maria

reinstated in Urbino after Leo's death in 1522.

This Duke married Leonora Gonzaga, a princess of the House of Mantua.

Their portraits, painted by Titian, adorn the Venetian room of the

Uffizzi. Of their son, Guidobaldo II., little need be said. He was

twice married, first to Giulia Varano, Duchess by inheritance of

Camerino; secondly, to Vittoria Farnese, daughter of the Duke of

Parma. Guidobaldo spent a lifetime in petty quarrels with his

subjects, whom he treated badly, attempting to draw from their pockets

the wealth which his father and the Montefeltri had won in military

service. He intervened at an awkward period of Italian politics. The

old Italy of despots, commonwealths, and Condottieri, in which his

predecessors played substantial parts, was at an end. The new Italy of

Popes and Austro-Spanish dynasties had hardly settled into shape.

Between these epochs, Guidobaldo II., of whom we have a dim and hazy

presentation on the page of history, seems somehow to have fallen

flat. As a sign of altered circumstances, he removed his court to

Pesaro, and built the great palace of the Della Roveres upon the

public square.

Guidobaldaccio, as he was called, died in 1574, leaving an only son,

Francesco Maria II., whose life and character illustrate the new age

which had begun for Italy. He was educated in Spain at the court of

Philip II., where he spent more than two years. When he returned, his

Spanish haughtiness, punctilious attention to etiquette, and

superstitious piety attracted observation. The violent temper of the

Della Roveres, which Francesco Maria I. displayed in acts of

homicide, and which had helped to win his bad name for Guidobaldaccio,

took the form of sullenness in the last Duke. The finest episode in

his life was the part he played in the battle of Lepanto, under his

old comrade, Don John of Austria. His father forced him to an

uncongenial marriage with Lucrezia d'Este, Princess of Ferrara. She

left him, and took refuge in her native city, then honoured by the

presence of Tasso and Guarini. He bore her departure with

philosophical composure, recording the event in his diary as something

to be dryly grateful for. Left alone, the Duke abandoned himself to

solitude, religious exercises, hunting, and the economy of his

impoverished dominions. He became that curious creature, a man of

narrow nature and mediocre capacity, who, dedicated to the cult of

self, is fain to pass for saint and sage in easy circumstances. He

married, for the second time, a lady, Livia della Rovere, who belonged

to his own family, but had been born in private station. She brought

him one son, the Prince Federigo-Ubaldo. This youth might have

sustained the ducal honours of Urbino, but for his sage-saint father's

want of wisdom. The boy was a spoiled child in infancy. Inflated with

Spanish vanity from the cradle, taught to regard his subjects as

dependents on a despot's will, abandoned to the caprices of his own

ungovernable temper, without substantial aid from the paternal piety

or stoicism, he rapidly became a most intolerable princeling. His

father married him, while yet a boy, to Claudia de' Medici, and

virtually abdicated in his favour. Left to his own devices, Federigo

chose companions from the troupes of players whom he drew from Venice.

He filled his palaces with harlots, and degraded himself upon the

stage in parts of mean buffoonery. The resources of the duchy were

racked to support these parasites. Spanish rules of etiquette and

ceremony were outraged by their orgies. His bride brought him one

daughter, Vittoria, who afterwards became the wife of Ferdinand, Grand

Duke of Tuscany. Then in the midst of his low dissipation and

offences against ducal dignity, he died of apoplexy at the early age

of eighteen--the victim, in the severe judgment of history, of his

father's selfishness and want of practical ability.

This happened in 1623. Francesco Maria was stunned by the blow. His

withdrawal from the duties of the sovereignty in favour of such a son

had proved a constitutional unfitness for the duties of his station.

The life he loved was one of seclusion in a round of pious exercises,

petty studies, peddling economies, and mechanical amusements. A

powerful and grasping Pope was on the throne of Rome. Urban at this

juncture pressed Francesco Maria hard; and in 1624 the last Duke of

Urbino devolved his lordships to the Holy See. He survived the formal

act of abdication seven years; when he died, the Pontiff added his

duchy to the Papal States, which thenceforth stretched from Naples to

the bounds of Venice on the Po.

III

Duke Frederick began the palace at Urbino in 1454, when he was still

only Count. The architect was Luziano of Lauranna, a Dalmatian; and

the beautiful white limestone, hard as marble, used in the

construction, was brought from the Dalmatian coast. This stone, like

the Istrian stone of Venetian buildings, takes and retains the chisel

mark with wonderful precision. It looks as though, when fresh, it must

have had the pliancy of clay, so delicately are the finest curves in

scroll or foliage scooped from its substance. And yet it preserves

each cusp and angle of the most elaborate pattern with the crispness

and the sharpness of a crystal.

When wrought by a clever craftsman, its surface has neither the

waxiness of Parian, nor the brittle edge of Carrara marble; and it

resists weather better than marble of the choicest quality. This may

be observed in many monuments of Venice, where the stone has been long

exposed to sea-air. These qualities of the Dalmatian limestone, no

less than its agreeable creamy hue and smooth dull polish, adapt it to

decoration in low relief. The most attractive details in the palace at

Urbino are friezes carved of this material in choice designs of early

Renaissance dignity and grace. One chimney-piece in the Sala degli

Angeli deserves especial comment. A frieze of dancing Cupids, with

gilt hair and wings, their naked bodies left white on a ground of

ultramarine, is supported by broad flat pilasters. These are engraved

with children holding pots of flowers; roses on one side, carnations

on the other. Above the frieze another pair of angels, one at each

end, hold lighted torches; and the pyramidal cap of the chimney is

carved with two more, flying, and supporting the eagle of the

Montefeltri on a raised medallion. Throughout the palace we notice

emblems appropriate to the Houses of Montefeltro and Della Rovere:

their arms, three golden bends upon a field of azure: the Imperial

eagle, granted when Montefeltro was made a fief of the Empire: the

Garter of England, worn by the Dukes Federigo and Guidobaldo: the

ermine of Naples: the _ventosa_, or cupping-glass, adopted for a

private badge by Frederick: the golden oak-tree on an azure field of

Della Rovere: the palm-tree, bent beneath a block of stone, with its

accompanying motto, _Inclinata Resurgam_: the cipher, FE DX. Profile

medallions of Federigo and Guidobaldo, wrought in the lowest possible

relief, adorn the staircases. Round the great courtyard runs a frieze

of military engines and ensigns, trophies, machines, and implements of

war, alluding to Duke Frederick's profession of Condottiere. The

doorways are enriched with scrolls of heavy-headed flowers, acanthus

foliage, honeysuckles, ivy-berries, birds and boys and sphinxes, in

all the riot of Renaissance fancy.

This profusion of sculptured _rilievo_ is nearly all that remains to

show how rich the palace was in things of beauty. Castiglione, writing

in the reign of Guidobaldo, says that 'in the opinion of many it is

the fairest to be found in Italy; and the Duke filled it so well with

all things fitting its magnificence, that it seemed less like a palace

than a city. Not only did he collect articles of common use, vessels

of silver, and trappings for chambers of rare cloths of gold and silk,

and suchlike furniture, but he added multitudes of bronze and marble

statues, exquisite pictures, and instruments of music of all sorts.

There was nothing but was of the finest and most excellent quality to

be seen there. Moreover, he gathered together at a vast cost a large

number of the best and rarest books in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, all

of which he adorned with gold and silver, esteeming them the chiefest

treasure of his spacious palace.' When Cesare Borgia entered Urbino as

conqueror in 1502, he is said to have carried off loot to the value of

150,000 ducats, or perhaps about a quarter of a million sterling.

Vespasiano, the Florentine bookseller, has left us a minute account of

the formation of the famous library of manuscripts, which he valued at

considerably over 30,000 ducats. Yet wandering now through these

deserted halls, we seek in vain for furniture or tapestry or works of

art. The books have been removed to Rome. The pictures are gone, no

man knows whither. The plate has long been melted down. The

instruments of music are broken. If frescoes adorned the corridors,

they have been whitewashed; the ladies' chambers have been stripped of

their rich arras. Only here and there we find a raftered ceiling,

painted in fading colours, which, taken with the stonework of the

chimney, and some fragments of inlaid panel-work on door or window,

enables us to reconstruct the former richness of these princely rooms.

Exception must be made in favour of two apartments between the towers

upon the southern facade. These were apparently the private rooms of

the Duke and Duchess, and they are still approached by a great winding

staircase in one of the _torricini_. Adorned in indestructible or

irremovable materials, they retain some traces of their ancient

splendour. On the first floor, opening on the vaulted loggia, we find

a little chapel encrusted with lovely work in stucco and marble;

friezes of bulls, sphinxes, sea-horses, and foliage; with a low relief

of Madonna and Child in the manner of Mino da Fiesole. Close by is a

small study with inscriptions to the Muses and Apollo. The cabinet

connecting these two cells has a Latin legend, to say that Religion

here dwells near the temple of the liberal arts:

Bina vides parvo discrimine juncta sacella,

Altera pars Musis altera sacra Deo est.

On the floor above, corresponding in position to this apartment, is a

second, of even greater interest, since it was arranged by the Duke

Frederick for his own retreat. The study is panelled in tarsia of

beautiful design and execution. Three of the larger compartments show

Faith, Hope, and Charity; figures not unworthy of a Botticelli or a

Filippino Lippi. The occupations of the Duke are represented on a

smaller scale by armour, _bâtons_ of command, scientific instruments,

lutes, viols, and books, some open and some shut. The Bible, Homer,

Virgil, Seneca, Tacitus, and Cicero, are lettered; apparently to

indicate his favourite authors. The Duke himself, arrayed in his state

robes, occupies a fourth great panel; and the whole of this elaborate

composition is harmonised by emblems, badges, and occasional devices

of birds, articles of furniture, and so forth. The tarsia, or inlaid

wood of different kinds and colours, is among the best in this kind of

art to be found in Italy, though perhaps it hardly deserves to rank

with the celebrated choir-stalls of Bergamo and Monte Oliveto. Hard by

is a chapel, adorned, like the lower one, with excellent reliefs. The

loggia to which these rooms have access looks across the Apennines,

and down on what was once a private garden. It is now enclosed and

paved for the exercise of prisoners who are confined in one part of

the desecrated palace!

A portion of the pile is devoted to more worthy purposes; for the

Academy of Raphael here holds its sittings, and preserves a collection

of curiosities and books illustrative of the great painter's life and

works. They have recently placed in a tiny oratory, scooped by

Guidobaldo II. from the thickness of the wall, a cast of Raphael's

skull, which will be studied with interest and veneration. It has the

fineness of modelling combined with shapeliness of form and smallness

of scale which is said to have characterised Mozart and Shelley.

The impression left upon the mind after traversing this palace in its

length and breadth is one of weariness and disappointment. How shall

we reconstruct the long-past life which filled its rooms with sound,

the splendour of its pageants, the thrill of tragedies enacted here?

It is not difficult to crowd its doors and vacant spaces with liveried

servants, slim pages in tight hose, whose well-combed hair escapes

from tiny caps upon their silken shoulders. We may even replace the

tapestries of Troy which hung one hall, and build again the sideboards

with their embossed gilded plate. But are these chambers really those

where Emilia Pia held debate on love with Bembo and Castiglione; where

Bibbiena's witticisms and Fra Serafino's pranks raised smiles on

courtly lips; where Bernardo Accolti, 'the Unique,' declaimed his

verses to applauding crowds? Is it possible that into yonder hall,

where now the lion of S. Mark looks down alone on staring desolation,

strode the Borgia in all his panoply of war, a gilded glittering

dragon, and from the dais tore the Montefeltri's throne, and from the

arras stripped their ensigns, replacing these with his own Bull and

Valentinus Dux? Here Tasso tuned his lyre for Francesco Maria's

wedding-feast, and read 'Aminta' to Lucrezia d'Este. Here Guidobaldo

listened to the jests and whispered scandals of the Aretine. Here

Titian set his easel up to paint; here the boy Raphael, cap in hand,

took signed and sealed credentials from his Duchess to the Gonfalonier

of Florence. Somewhere in these huge chambers, the courtiers sat

before a torch-lit stage, when Bibbiena's 'Calandria' and

Caetiglione's 'Tirsi,' with their miracles of masques and mummers,

whiled the night away. Somewhere, we know not where, Giuliano de'

Medici made love in these bare rooms to that mysterious mother of

ill-fated Cardinal Ippolito; somewhere, in some darker nook, the

bastard Alessandro sprang to his strange-fortuned life of tyranny and

license, which Brutus-Lorenzino cut short with a traitor's

poignard-thrust in Via Larga. How many men, illustrious for arts and

letters, memorable by their virtues or their crimes, have trod these

silent corridors, from the great Pope Julius down to James III.,

self-titled King of England, who tarried here with Clementina Sobieski

through some twelve months of his ex-royal exile! The memories of all

this folk, flown guests and masters of the still-abiding

palace-chambers, haunt us as we hurry through. They are but filmy

shadows. We cannot grasp them, localise them, people surrounding

emptiness with more than withering cobweb forms.

Death takes a stronger hold on us than bygone life. Therefore,

returning to the vast Throne-room, we animate it with one scene it

witnessed on an April night in 1508. Duke Guidobaldo had died at

Fossombrone, repeating to his friends around his bed these lines of

Virgil:

Me circum limus niger et deformis arundo Cocyti tardaque

palus inamabilis unda Alligat, et novies Styx interfusa

coercet.

His body had been carried on the shoulders of servants through those

mountain ways at night, amid the lamentations of gathering multitudes

and the baying of dogs from hill-set farms alarmed by flaring

flambeaux. Now it is laid in state in the great hall. The dais and the

throne are draped in black. The arms and _bâtons_ of his father hang

about the doorways. His own ensigns are displayed in groups and

trophies, with the banners of S. Mark, the Montefeltrian eagle, and

the cross keys of S. Peter. The hall itself is vacant, save for the

high-reared catafalque of sable velvet and gold damask, surrounded

with wax candles burning steadily. Round it passes a ceaseless stream

of people, coming and going, gazing at their Duke. He is attired in

crimson hose and doublet of black damask. Black velvet slippers are on

his feet, and his ducal cap is of black velvet. The mantle of the

Garter, made of dark-blue Alexandrine velvet, hooded with crimson,

lined with white silk damask, and embroidered with the badge, drapes

the stiff sleeping form.

It is easier to conjure up the past of this great palace, strolling

round it in free air and twilight; perhaps because the landscape and

the life still moving on the city streets bring its exterior into

harmony with real existence. The southern façade, with its vaulted

balconies and flanking towers, takes the fancy, fascinates the eye,

and lends itself as a fit stage for puppets of the musing mind. Once

more imagination plants trim orange-trees in giant jars of Gubbio ware

upon the pavement where the garden of the Duchess lay--the pavement

paced in these bad days by convicts in grey canvas jackets--that

pavement where Monsignor Bombo courted 'dear dead women' with

Platonic phrase, smothering the Menta of his natural man in lettuce

culled from Academe and thyme of Mount Hymettus. In yonder loggia,

lifted above the garden and the court, two lovers are in earnest

converse. They lean beneath the coffered arch, against the marble of

the balustrade, he fingering his dagger under the dark velvet doublet,

she playing with a clove carnation, deep as her own shame. The man is

Giannandrea, broad-shouldered bravo of Verona, Duke Guidobaldo's

favourite and carpet-count. The lady is Madonna Maria, daughter of

Rome's Prefect, widow of Venanzio Varano, whom the Borgia strangled.

On their discourse a tale will hang of woman's frailty and man's

boldness--Camerino's Duchess yielding to a low-born suitor's stalwart

charms. And more will follow, when that lady's brother, furious

Francesco Maria della Rovere, shall stab the bravo in torch-litten

palace rooms with twenty poignard strokes 'twixt waist and throat, and

their Pandarus shall be sent down to his account by a varlet's

_coltellata_ through the midriff. Imagination shifts the scene, and

shows in that same loggia Rome's warlike Pope, attended by his

cardinals and all Urbino's chivalry. The snowy beard of Julius flows

down upon his breast, where jewels clasp the crimson mantle, as in

Raphael's picture. His eyes are bright with wine; for he has come to

gaze on sunset from the banquet-chamber, and to watch the line of

lamps which soon will leap along that palace cornice in his honour.

Behind him lies Bologna humbled. The Pope returns, a conqueror, to

Rome. Yet once again imagination is at work. A gaunt, bald man,

close-habited in Spanish black, his spare, fine features carved in

purest ivory, leans from that balcony. Gazing with hollow eyes, he

tracks the swallows in their flight, and notes that winter is at hand.

This is the last Duke of Urbino, Francesco Maria II., he whose young

wife deserted him, who made for himself alone a hermit-pedant's round

of petty cares and niggard avarice and mean-brained superstition. He

drew a second consort from the convent, and raised up seed unto his

line by forethought, but beheld his princeling fade untimely in the

bloom of boyhood. Nothing is left but solitude. To the mortmain of the

Church reverts Urbino's lordship, and even now he meditates the terms

of devolution. Jesuits cluster in the rooms behind, with comfort for

the ducal soul and calculations for the interests of Holy See.

A farewell to these memories of Urbino's dukedom should be taken in

the crypt of the cathedral, where Francesco Maria II., the last Duke,

buried his only son and all his temporal hopes. The place is scarcely

solemn. Its dreary _barocco_ emblems mar the dignity of death. A bulky

_Pietà_ by Gian Bologna, with Madonna's face unfinished, towers up and

crowds the narrow cell. Religion has evanished from this late

Renaissance art, nor has the afterglow of Guido Reni's hectic piety

yet overflushed it. Chilled by the stifling humid sense of an extinct

race here entombed in its last representative, we gladly emerge from

the sepulchral vault into the air of day.

Filippo Visconti, with a smile on his handsome face, is waiting for us

at the inn. His horses, sleek, well fed, and rested, toss their heads

impatiently. We take our seats in the carriage, open wide beneath a

sparkling sky, whirl past the palace and its ghost-like recollections,

and are halfway on the road to Fossombrone in a cloud of dust and

whirr of wheels before we think of looking back to greet Urbino. There

is just time. The last decisive turning lies in front. We stand

bareheaded to salute the grey mass of buildings ridged along the sky.

Then the open road invites us with its varied scenery and movement.

From the shadowy past we drive into the world of human things, for

ever changefully unchanged, unrestfully the same. This interchange

between dead memories and present life is the delight of travel.

* * * * *

_VITTORIA ACCORAMBONI_

AND THE TRAGEDY OF WEBSTER

I

During the pontificate of Gregory XIII. (1572-85), Papal authority in

Rome reached its lowest point of weakness, and the ancient splendour

of the Papal court was well-nigh eclipsed. Art and learning had died

out. The traditions of the days of Leo, Julius, and Paul III. were

forgotten. It seemed as though the genius of the Renaissance had

migrated across the Alps. All the powers of the Papacy were directed

to the suppression of heresies and to the re-establishment of

spiritual supremacy over the intellect of Europe. Meanwhile society in

Rome returned to mediæval barbarism. The veneer of classical

refinement and humanistic urbanity, which for a time had hidden the

natural savagery of the Roman nobles, wore away. The Holy City became

a den of bandits; the territory of the Church supplied a battle-ground

for senseless party strife, which the weak old man who wore the triple

crown was quite unable to control. It is related how a robber

chieftain, Marianazzo, refused the offer of a general pardon from the

Pope, alleging that the profession of brigand was far more lucrative,

and offered greater security of life, than any trade within the walls

of Rome. The Campagna, the ruined citadels about the basements of the

Sabine and Ciminian hills, the quarters of the aristocracy within the

city, swarmed with bravos, who were protected by great nobles and fed

by decent citizens for the advantages to be derived from the

assistance of abandoned and courageous ruffians. Life, indeed, had

become impossible without fixed compact with the powers of

lawlessness. There was hardly a family in Rome which did not number

some notorious criminal among the outlaws. Murder, sacrilege, the love

of adventure, thirst for plunder, poverty, hostility to the ascendant

faction of the moment, were common causes of voluntary or involuntary

outlawry; nor did public opinion regard a bandit's calling as other

than honourable.

It may readily be imagined that in such a state of society the

grisliest tragedies were common enough in Rome. The history of some of

these has been preserved to us in documents digested from public

trials and personal observation by contemporary writers. That of the

Cenci, in which a notorious act of parricide furnished the plot of a

popular novella, is well known. And such a tragedy, even more rife in

characteristic incidents, and more distinguished by the quality of its

_dramatis personæ_, is that of Vittoria Accoramboni.

Vittoria was born in 1557, of a noble but impoverished family, at

Gubbio, among the hills of Umbria. Her biographers are rapturous in

their praises of her beauty, grace, and exceeding charm of manner. Not

only was her person most lovely, but her mind shone at first with all

the amiable lustre of a modest, innocent, and winning youth. Her

father, Claudio Accoramboni, removed to Rome, where his numerous

children were brought up under the care of their mother, Tarquinia, an

ambitious and unscrupulous woman, bent on rehabilitating the decayed

honours of their house. Here Vittoria in early girlhood soon became

the fashion. She exercised an irresistible influence over all who saw

her, and many were the offers of marriage she refused. At length a

suitor appeared whose condition and connection with the Roman

ecclesiastical nobility rendered him acceptable in the eyes of the

Accoramboni. Francesco Peretti was welcomed as the successful

candidate for Vittoria's hand. His mother, Camilla, was sister to

Felice, Cardinal of Montalto; and her son, Francesco Mignucci, had

changed his surname in compliment to this illustrious relative. The

Peretti were of humble origin. The cardinal himself had tended swine

in his native village; but, supported by an invincible belief in his

own destinies, and gifted with a powerful intellect and determined

character, he passed through all grades of the Franciscan Order to its

generalship, received the bishoprics of Fermo and S. Agata, and

lastly, in the year 1570, assumed the scarlet with the title of

Cardinal Montalto. He was now upon the high way to the Papacy,

amassing money by incessant care, studying the humours of surrounding

factions, effacing his own personality, and by mixing but little in

the intrigues of the court, winning the reputation of a prudent,

inoffensive old man. These were his tactics for securing the Papal

throne; nor were his expectations frustrated; for in 1585 he was

chosen Pope, the parties of the Medici and the Farnesi agreeing to

accept him as a compromise. When Sixtus V. was once firmly seated on

S. Peter's chair, he showed himself in his true colours. An implacable

administrator of severest justice, a rigorous economist, an

iconoclastic foe to paganism, the first act of his reign was to

declare a war of extirpation against the bandits who had reduced Rome

in his predecessor's rule to anarchy.

It was the nephew, then, of this man, whom historians have judged the

greatest personage of his own times, that Vittoria Accoramboni married

on the 28th of June 1573. For a short while the young couple lived

happily together. According to some accounts of their married life,

the bride secured the favour of her powerful uncle-in-law, who

indulged her costly fancies to the full. It is, however, more probable

that the Cardinal Montalto treated her follies with a grudging

parsimony; for we soon find the Peretti household hopelessly involved

in debt. Discord, too, arose between Vittoria and her husband on the

score of a certain levity in her behaviour; and it was rumoured that

even during the brief space of their union she had proved a faithless

wife. Yet she contrived to keep Francesco's confidence, and it is

certain that her family profited by their connection with the Peretti.

Of her six brothers, Mario, the eldest, was a favourite courtier of

the great Cardinal d'Este. Ottavio was in orders, and through

Montalto's influence obtained the See of Fossombrone. The same

eminent protector placed Scipione in the service of the Cardinal

Sforza. Camillo, famous for his beauty and his courage, followed the

fortunes of Filibert of Savoy, and died in France. Flaminio was still

a boy, dependent, as the sequel of this story shows, upon his sister's

destiny. Of Marcello, the second in age and most important in the

action of this tragedy, it is needful to speak with more

particularity. He was young, and, like the rest of his breed,

singularly handsome--so handsome, indeed, that he is said to have

gained an infamous ascendency over the great Duke of Bracciano, whose

privy chamberlain he had become. Marcello was an outlaw for the murder

of Matteo Pallavicino, the brother of the Cardinal of that name. This

did not, however, prevent the chief of the Orsini house from making

him his favourite and confidential friend. Marcello, who seems to have

realised in actual life the worst vices of those Roman courtiers

described for us by Aretino, very soon conceived the plan of exalting

his own fortunes by trading on his sister's beauty. He worked upon the

Duke of Bracciano's mind so cleverly, that he brought this haughty

prince to the point of an insane passion for Peretti's young wife; and

meanwhile so contrived to inflame the ambition of Vittoria and her

mother, Tarquinia, that both were prepared to dare the worst of crimes

in expectation of a dukedom. The game was a difficult one to play. Not

only had Francesco Peretti first to be murdered, but the inequality of

birth and wealth and station between Vittoria and the Duke of

Bracciano rendered a marriage almost impossible. It was also an affair

of delicacy to stimulate without satisfying the Duke's passion. Yet

Marcello did not despair. The stakes were high enough to justify great

risks; and all he put in peril was his sister's honour, the fame of

the Accoramboni, and the favour of Montalto. Vittoria, for her part,

trusted in her power to ensnare and secure the noble prey both had in

view.

Paolo Giordano Orsini, born about the year 1537, was reigning Duke of

Bracciano. Among Italian princes he ranked at least upon a par with

the Dukes of Urbino, and his family, by its alliances, was more

illustrious than any of that time in Italy. He was a man of gigantic

stature, prodigious corpulence, and marked personal daring; agreeable

in manners, but subject to uncontrollable fits of passion, and

incapable of self-restraint when crossed in any whim or fancy. Upon

the habit of his body it is needful to insist, in order that the part

he played in this tragedy of intrigue, crime, and passion may be well

defined. He found it difficult to procure a charger equal to his

weight, and he was so fat that a special dispensation relieved him

from the duty of genuflexion in the Papal presence. Though lord of a

large territory, yielding princely revenues, he laboured under heavy

debts; for no great noble of the period lived more splendidly, with

less regard for his finances. In the politics of that age and country,

Paolo Giordano leaned toward France. Yet he was a grandee of Spain,

and had played a distinguished part in the battle of Lepanto. Now the

Duke of Bracciano was a widower. He had been married in 1553 to

Isabella de' Medici, daughter of the Grand Duke Cosimo, sister of

Francesco, Bianca Capello's lover, and of the Cardinal Ferdinando.

Suspicion of adultery with Troilo Orsini had fallen on Isabella, and

her husband, with the full concurrence of her brothers, removed her in

1576 from this world.[7] No one thought the worse of Bracciano for

this murder of his wife. In those days of abandoned vice and intricate

villany, certain points of honour were maintained with scrupulous

fidelity. A wife's adultery was enough to justify the most savage and

licentious husband in an act of semi-judicial vengeance; and the shame

she brought upon his head was shared by the members of her own house,

so that they stood by, consenting to her death. Isabella, it may be

said, left one son, Virginio, who became in due time Duke of

Bracciano.

It appears that in the year 1581, four years after Vittoria's

marriage, the Duke of Bracciano had satisfied Marcello of his

intention to make her his wife, and of his willingness to countenance

Francesco Peretti's murder. Marcello, feeling sure of his game,

introduced the Duke in private to his sister, and induced her to

overcome any natural repugnance she may have felt for the unwieldy and

gross lover. Having reached this point, it was imperative to push

matters quickly on toward matrimony.

But how should the unfortunate Francesco be entrapped? They caught him

in a snare of peculiar atrocity, by working on the kindly feelings

which his love for Vittoria had caused him to extend to all the

Acooramboni. Marcello, the outlaw, was her favourite brother, and

Marcello at that time lay in hiding, under the suspicion of more than

ordinary crime, beyond the walls of Rome. Late in the evening of the

18th of April, while the Peretti family were retiring to bed, a

messenger from Marcello arrived, entreating Francesco to repair at

once to Monte Cavallo. Marcello had affairs of the utmost importance

to communicate, and begged his brother-in-law not to fail him at a

grievous pinch. The letter containing this request was borne by one

Dominico d'Aquaviva, _alias_ Il Mancino, a confederate of Vittoria's

waiting-maid. This fellow, like Marcello, was an outlaw; but when he

ventured into Rome he frequented Peretti's house, and had made himself

familiar with its master as a trusty bravo. Neither in the message,

therefore, nor in the messenger was there much to rouse suspicion. The

time, indeed, was oddly chosen, and Marcello had never made a similar

appeal on any previous occasion. Yet his necessities might surely have

obliged him to demand some more than ordinary favour from a brother.

Francesco immediately made himself ready to set out, armed only with

his sword and attended by a single servant. It was in vain that his

wife and his mother reminded him of the dangers of the night, the

loneliness of Monte Cavallo, its ruinous palaces and robber-haunted

caves. He was resolved to undertake the adventure, and went forth,

never to return. As he ascended the hill, he fell to earth, shot with

three harquebuses. His body was afterwards found on Monte Cavallo,

stabbed through and through, without a trace that could identify the

murderers. Only, in the course of subsequent investigations, Il

Mancino (on the 24th of February 1582) made the following

statements:--That Vittoria's mother, assisted by the waiting woman,

had planned the trap; that Marchionne of Gubbio and Paolo Barca of

Bracciano, two of the Duke's men, had despatched the victim. Marcello

himself, it seems, had come from Bracciano to conduct the whole

affair. Suspicion fell immediately upon Vittoria and her kindred,

together with the Duke of Bracciano; nor was this diminished when the

Accoramboni, fearing the pursuit of justice, took refuge in a villa of

the Duke's at Magnanapoli a few days after the murder.

A cardinal's nephew, even in those troublous times, was not killed

without some noise being made about the matter. Accordingly Pope

Gregory XIII. began to take measures for discovering the authors of

the crime. Strange to say, however, the Cardinal Montalto,

notwithstanding the great love he was known to bear his nephew, begged

that the investigation might be dropped. The coolness with which he

first received the news of Francesco Peretti's death, the

dissimulation with which he met the Pope's expression of sympathy in a

full consistory, his reserve in greeting friends on ceremonial visits

of condolence, and, more than all, the self-restraint he showed in the

presence of the Duke of Bracciano, impressed the society of Rome with

the belief that he was of a singularly moderate and patient temper. It

was thought that the man who could so tamely submit to his nephew's

murder, and suspend the arm of justice when already raised for

vengeance, must prove a mild and indulgent ruler. When, therefore, in

the fifth year after this event, Montalto was elected Pope, men

ascribed his elevation in no small measure to his conduct at the

present crisis. Some, indeed, attributed his extraordinary moderation

and self-control to the right cause. _'Veramente costui è un gran

frate!_' was Gregory's remark at the close of the consistory when

Montalto begged him to let the matter of Peretti's murder rest. '_Of a

truth, that fellow is a consummate hypocrite!_' How accurate this

judgment was, appeared when Sixtus V. assumed the reins of power. The

same man who, as monk and cardinal, had smiled on Bracciano, though he

knew him to be his nephew's assassin, now, as Pontiff and sovereign,

bade the chief of the Orsini purge his palace and dominions of the

scoundrels he was wont to harbour, adding significantly, that if

Felice Peretti forgave what had been done against him in a private

station, he would exact uttermost vengeance for disobedience to the

will of Sixtus. The Duke of Bracciano judged it best, after that

warning, to withdraw from Rome.

Francesco Peretti had been murdered on the 16th of April 1581. Sixtus

V. was proclaimed on the 24th of April 1585. In this interval Vittoria

underwent a series of extraordinary perils and adventures. First of

all, she had been secretly married to the Duke in his gardens of

Magnanapoli at the end of April 1581. That is to say, Marcello and she

secured their prize, as well as they were able, the moment after

Francesco had been removed by murder. But no sooner had the marriage

become known, than the Pope, moved by the scandal it created, no less

than by the urgent instance of the Orsini and Medici, declared it

void. After some while spent in vain resistance, Bracciano submitted,

and sent Vittoria back to her father's house. By an order issued under

Gregory's own hand, she was next removed to the prison of Corte

Savella, thence to the monastery of S. Cecilia in Trastevere, and

finally to the Castle of S. Angelo. Here, at the end of December 1581,

she was put on trial for the murder of her first husband. In prison

she seems to have borne herself bravely, arraying her beautiful person

in delicate attire, entertaining visitors, exacting from her friends

the honours due to a duchess, and sustaining the frequent examinations

to which she was submitted with a bold, proud front. In the middle of

the month of July her constancy was sorely tried by the receipt of a

letter in the Duke's own handwriting, formally renouncing his

marriage. It was only by a lucky accident that she was prevented on

this occasion from committing suicide. The Papal court meanwhile kept

urging her either to retire to a monastery or to accept another

husband. She firmly refused to embrace the religious life, and

declared that she was already lawfully united to a living husband, the

Duke of Bracciano. It seemed impossible to deal with her; and at last,

on the 8th of November, she was released from prison under the

condition of retirement to Gubbio. The Duke had lulled his enemies to

rest by the pretence of yielding to their wishes. But Marcello was

continually beside him at Bracciano, where we read of a mysterious

Greek enchantress whom he hired to brew love-philters for the

furtherance of his ambitious plots. Whether Bracciano was stimulated

by the brother's arguments or by the witch's potions need not be too

curiously questioned. But it seems in any case certain that absence

inflamed his passion instead of cooling it.

Accordingly, in September 1583, under the excuse of a pilgrimage to

Loreto, he contrived to meet Vittoria at Trevi, whence he carried her

in triumph to Bracciano. Here he openly acknowledged her as his wife,

installing her with all the splendour due to a sovereign duchess. On

the 10th of October following, he once more performed the marriage

ceremony in the principal church of his fief; and in the January of

1584 he brought her openly to Rome. This act of contumacy to the Pope,

both as feudal superior and as supreme Pontiff, roused all the former

opposition to his marriage. Once more it was declared invalid. Once

more the Duke pretended to give way. But at this juncture Gregory

died; and while the conclave was sitting for the election of the new

Pope, he resolved to take the law into his own hands, and to ratify

his union with Vittoria by a third and public marriage in Rome. On the

morning of the 24th of April 1585, their nuptials were accordingly

once more solemnised in the Orsini palace. Just one hour after the

ceremony, as appears from the marriage register, the news arrived of

Cardinal Montalto's election to the Papacy, Vittoria lost no time in

paying her respects to Camilla, sister of the new Pope, her former

mother-in-law. The Duke visited Sixtus V. in state to compliment him

on his elevation. But the reception which both received proved that

Rome was no safe place for them to live in. They consequently made up

their minds for flight.

A chronic illness from which Bracciano had lately suffered furnished a

sufficient pretext. This seems to have been something of the nature of

a cancerous ulcer, which had to be treated by the application of raw

meat to open sores. Such details are only excusable in the present

narrative on the ground that Bracciano's disease considerably affects

our moral judgment of the woman who could marry a man thus physically

tainted, and with her husband's blood upon his hands. At any rate,

the Duke's _lupa_ justified his trying what change of air, together

with the sulphur waters of Abano, would do for him.

The Duke and Duchess arrived in safety at Venice, where they had

engaged the Dandolo palace on the Zuecca. There they only stayed a few

days, removing to Padua, where they had hired palaces of the Foscari

in the Arena and a house called De' Cavalli. At Salò, also, on the

Lake of Garda, they provided themselves with fit dwellings for their

princely state and their large retinues, intending to divide their

time between the pleasures which the capital of luxury afforded and

the simpler enjoyments of the most beautiful of the Italian lakes. But

_la gioia dei profani è un fumo passaggier_. Paolo Giordano Orsini,

Duke of Bracciano, died suddenly at Salò on the 10th of November 1585,

leaving the young and beautiful Vittoria helpless among enemies. What

was the cause of his death? It is not possible to give a clear and

certain answer. We have seen that he suffered from a horrible and

voracious disease, which after his removal from Rome seems to have

made progress. Yet though this malady may well have cut his life

short, suspicion of poison was not, in the circumstances, quite

unreasonable. The Grand Duke of Tuscany, the Pope, and the Orsini

family were all interested in his death. Anyhow, he had time to make a

will in Vittoria's favour, leaving her large sums of money, jewels,

goods, and houses--enough, in fact, to support her ducal dignity with

splendour. His hereditary fiefs and honours passed by right to his

only son, Virginio.

Vittoria, accompanied by her brother, Marcello, and the whole court of

Bracciano, repaired at once to Padua, where she was soon after joined

by Flaminio, and by the Prince Lodovico Orsini. Lodovico Orsini

assumed the duty of settling Vittoria's affairs under her dead

husband's will. In life he had been the Duke's ally as well as

relative. His family pride was deeply wounded by what seemed to him an

ignoble, as it was certainly an unequal, marriage. He now showed

himself the relentless enemy of the Duchess. Disputes arose between

them as to certain details, which seem to have been legally decided in

the widow's favour. On the night of the 22nd of December, however,

forty men disguised in black and fantastically tricked out to elude

detection, surrounded her palace. Through the long galleries and

chambers hung with arras, eight of them went, bearing torches, in

search of Vittoria and her brothers. Marcello escaped, having fled the

house under suspicion of the murder of one of his own followers.

Flaminio, the innocent and young, was playing on his lute and singing

_Miserere_ in the great hall of the palace. The murderers surprised

him with a shot from one of their harquebuses. He ran, wounded in the

shoulder, to his sister's room. She, it is said, was telling her beads

before retiring for the night. When three of the assassins entered,

she knelt before the crucifix, and there they stabbed her in the left

breast, turning the poignard in the wound, and asking her with savage

insults if her heart was pierced. Her last words were, 'Jesus, I

pardon you.' Then they turned to Flaminio, and left him pierced with

seventy-four stiletto wounds.

The authorities of Padua identified the bodies of Vittoria and

Flaminio, and sent at once for further instructions to Venice.

Meanwhile it appears that both corpses were laid out in one open

coffin for the people to contemplate. The palace and the church of the

Eremitani, to which they had been removed, were crowded all through

the following day with a vast concourse of the Paduans. Vittoria's

wonderful dead body, pale yet sweet to look upon, the golden hair

flowing around her marble shoulders, the red wound in her breast

uncovered, the stately limbs arrayed in satin as she died, maddened

the populace with its surpassing loveliness. '_Dentibus fremebant_,'

says the chronicler, when they beheld that gracious lady stiff in

death. And of a truth, if her corpse was actually exposed in the

chapel of the Eremitani, as we have some right to assume, the

spectacle must have been impressive. Those grim gaunt frescoes of

Mantegna looked down on her as she lay stretched upon her bier, solemn

and calm, and, but for pallor, beautiful as though in life. No wonder

that the folk forgot her first husband's murder, her less than comely

marriage to the second. It was enough for them that this flower of

surpassing loveliness had been cropped by villains in its bloom.

Gathering in knots around the torches placed beside the corpse, they

vowed vengeance against the Orsini; for suspicion, not unnaturally,

fell on Prince Lodovico.

The Prince was arrested and interrogated before the court of Padua. He

entered their hall attended by forty armed men, responded haughtily to

their questions, and demanded free passage for his courier to Virginio

Orsini, then at Florence. To this demand the court acceded; but the

precaution of way-laying the courier and searching his person was

very wisely taken. Besides some formal dispatches which announced

Vittoria's assassination, they found in this man's boot a compromising

letter, declaring Virginio a party to the crime, and asserting that

Lodovico had with his own poignard killed their victim. Padua placed

itself in a state of defence, and prepared to besiege the palace of

Prince Lodovico, who also got himself in readiness for battle.

Engines, culverins, and firebrands were directed against the

barricades which he had raised. The militia was called out and the

Brenta was strongly guarded. Meanwhile the Senate of S. Mark had

dispatched the Avogadore, Aloisio Bragadin, with full power to the

scene of action. Lodovico Orsini, it may be mentioned, was in their

service; and had not this affair intervened, he would in a few weeks

have entered on his duties as Governor for Venice of Corfu.

The bombardment of Orsini's palace began on Christmas Day. Three of

the Prince's men were killed in the first assault; and since the

artillery brought to bear upon him threatened speedy ruin to the house

and its inhabitants, he made up his mind to surrender. 'The Prince

Luigi,' writes one-chronicler of these events, 'walked attired in

brown, his poignard at his side, and his cloak slung elegantly under

his arm. The weapon being taken from him, he leaned upon a balustrade,

and began to trim his nails with a little pair of scissors he happened

to find there.' On the 27th he was strangled in prison by order of the

Venetian Republic. His body was carried to be buried, according to his

own will, in the church of S. Maria dell' Orto at Venice. Two of his

followers were hung next day. Fifteen were executed on the following

Monday; two of these were quartered alive; one of them, the Conte

Paganello, who confessed to having slain Vittoria, had his left side

probed with his own cruel dagger. Eight were condemned to the galleys,

six to prison, and eleven were acquitted. Thus ended this terrible

affair, which brought, it is said, good credit and renown to the lords

of Venice through all nations of the civilised world. It only remains

to be added that Marcello Accoramboni was surrendered to the Pope's

vengeance and beheaded at Ancona, where also his mysterious

accomplice, the Greek sorceress, perished.

II

This story of Vittoria Accoramboni's life and tragic ending is drawn,

in its main details, from a narrative published by Henri Beyle in his

'Chroniques et Novelles.'[8] He professes to have translated it

literally from a manuscript communicated to him by a nobleman of

Mantua; and there are strong internal evidences of the truth of this

assertion. Such compositions are frequent in Italian libraries, nor is

it rare for one of them to pass into the common market--as Mr.

Browning's famous purchase of the tale on which he based his 'Ring

and the Book' sufficiently proves. These pamphlets were produced, in

the first instance, to gratify the curiosity of the educated public in

an age which had no newspapers, and also to preserve the memory of

famous trials. How far the strict truth was represented, or whether,

as in the case of Beatrice Cenci, the pathetic aspect of the tragedy

was unduly dwelt on, depended, of course, upon the mental bias of the

scribe, upon his opportunities of obtaining exact information, and

upon the taste of the audience for whom he wrote. Therefore, in

treating such documents as historical data, we must be upon our

guard. Professor Gnoli, who has recently investigated the whole of

Vittoria's eventful story by the light of contemporary documents,

informs us that several narratives exist in manuscript, all dealing

more or less accurately with the details of the tragedy. One of these

was published in Italian at Brescia in 1586. A Frenchman, De Rosset,

printed the same story in its main outlines at Lyons in 1621. Our own

dramatist, John Webster, made it the subject of a tragedy, which he

gave to the press in 1612. What were his sources of information we do

not know for certain. But it is clear that he was well acquainted with

the history. He has changed some of the names and redistributed some

of the chief parts. Vittoria's first husband, for example, becomes

Camillo; her mother, named Cornelia instead of Tarquinia, is so far

from abetting Peretti's murder and countenancing her daughter's shame,

that she acts the _rôle_ of a domestic Cassandra. Flaminio and not

Marcello is made the main instrument of Vittoria's crime and

elevation. The Cardinal Montalto is called Monticelso, and his papal

title is Paul IV. instead of Sixtus V. These are details of

comparative indifference, in which a playwright may fairly use his

liberty of art. On the other hand, Webster shows a curious knowledge

of the picturesque circumstances of the tale. The garden in which

Vittoria meets Bracciano is the villa of Magnanapoli; Zanche, the

Moorish slave, combines Vittoria's waiting-woman, Caterina, and the

Greek sorceress who so mysteriously dogged Marcello's footsteps to the

death. The suspicion of Bracciano's murder is used to introduce a

quaint episode of Italian poisoning.

Webster exercised the dramatist's privilege of connecting various

threads of action in one plot, disregarding chronology, and hazarding

an ethical solution of motives which mere fidelity to fact hardly

warrants. He shows us Vittoria married to Camillo, a low-born and

witless fool, whose only merit consists in being nephew to the

Cardinal Monticelso, afterwards Pope Paul IV.[9] Paulo Giordano

Ursini, Duke of Brachiano, loves Vittoria, and she suggests to him

that, for the furtherance of their amours, his wife, the Duchess

Isabella, sister to Francesco de' Medici, Grand Duke of Florence,

should be murdered at the same time as her own husband, Camillo.

Brachiano is struck by this plan, and with the help of Vittoria's

brother, Flamineo, he puts it at once into execution. Flamineo hires a

doctor who poisons Brachiano's portrait, so that Isabella dies after

kissing it. He also with his own hands twists Camillo's neck during a

vaulting-match, making it appear that he came by his death

accidentally. Suspicion of the murder attaches, however, to Vittoria.

She is tried for her life before Monticelso and De' Medici; acquitted,

and relegated to a house of Convertites or female reformatory.

Brachiano, on the accession of Monticelso to the Papal throne,

resolves to leave Rome with Vittoria. They escape, together with her

mother Cornelia, and her brothers Flamineo and Marcello, to Padua; and

it is here that the last scenes of the tragedy are laid.

The use Webster made of Lodovico Orsini deserves particular attention.

He introduces this personage in the very first scene as a spendthrift,

who, having run through his fortune, has been outlawed. Count

Lodovico, as he is always called, has no relationship with the Orsini,

but is attached to the service of Francesco de' Medici, and is an old

lover of the Duchess Isabella. When, therefore, the Grand Duke

meditates vengeance on Brachiano, he finds a fitting instrument in the

desperate Lodovico. Together, in disguise, they repair to Padua.

Lodovico poisons the Duke of Brachiano's helmet, and has the

satisfaction of ending his last struggles by the halter. Afterwards,

with companions, habited as a masquer, he enters Vittoria's palace and

puts her to death together with her brother Flamineo. Just when the

deed of vengeance has been completed, young Giovanni Orsini, heir of

Brachiano, enters and orders the summary execution of Lodovico for

this deed of violence. Webster's invention in this plot is confined to

the fantastic incidents attending on the deaths of Isabella, Camillo,

and Brachiano, and to the murder of Marcello by his brother Flamineo,

with the further consequence of Cornelia's madness and death. He has

heightened our interest in Isabella, at the expense of Brachiano's

character, by making her an innocent and loving wife instead of an

adulteress. He has ascribed different motives from the real ones to

Lodovico in order to bring this personage into rank with the chief

actors, though this has been achieved with only moderate success.

Vittoria is abandoned to the darkest interpretation. She is a woman

who rises to eminence by crime, as an unfaithful wife, the murderess

of her husband, and an impudent defier of justice. Her brother,

Flamineo, becomes under Webster's treatment one of those worst human

infamies--a court dependent; ruffian, buffoon, pimp, murderer by

turns. Furthermore, and without any adequate object beyond that of

completing this study of a type he loved, Webster makes him murder his

own brother Marcello by treason. The part assigned to Marcello, it

should be said, is a genial and happy one; and Cornelia, the mother of

the Accoramboni, is a dignified character, pathetic in her suffering.

Webster, it may be added, treats the Cardinal Monticelso as allied in

some special way to the Medici. Yet certain traits in his character,

especially his avoidance of bloodshed and the tameness of his temper

after Camillo has been murdered, seem to have been studied from the

historical Sixtus.

III

The character of the 'White Devil, or Vittoria Corombona,' is perhaps

the most masterly creation of Webster's genius. Though her history is

a true one in its leading incidents, the poet, while portraying a real

personage, has conceived an original individuality. It is impossible

to know for certain how far the actual Vittoria was guilty of her

first husband's murder. Her personality fails to detach itself from

the romance of her biography by any salient qualities. But Webster,

with true playwright's instinct, casts aside historical doubts, and

delineates in his heroine a woman of a very marked and terrible

nature. Hard as adamant, uncompromising, ruthless, Vittoria follows

ambition as the loadstar of her life. It is the ambition to reign as

Duchess, far more than any passion for a paramour, which makes her

plot Camillo's and Isabella's murders, and throws her before marriage

into Brachiano's arms. Added to this ambition, she is possessed with

the cold demon of her own imperial and victorious beauty. She has the

courage of her criminality in the fullest sense; and much of the

fascination with which Webster has invested her, depends upon her

dreadful daring. Her portrait is drawn with full and firm touches.

Although she appears but five times on the scene, she fills it from

the first line of the drama to the last. Each appearance adds

effectively to the total impression. We see her first during a

criminal interview with Brachiano, contrived by her brother Flamineo.

The plot of the tragedy is developed in this scene; Vittoria

suggesting, under the metaphor of a dream, that her lover should

compass the deaths of his duchess and her husband. The dream is told

with deadly energy and ghastly picturesqueness. The cruel sneer at its

conclusion, murmured by a voluptuous woman in the ears of an

impassioned paramour, chills us with the sense of concentrated vice.

Her next appearance is before the court, on trial for her husband's

murder. The scene is celebrated, and has been much disputed by

critics. Relying on her own dauntlessness, on her beauty, and on the

protection of Brachiano, Vittoria hardly takes the trouble to plead

innocence or to rebut charges. She stands defiant, arrogant, vigilant,

on guard; flinging the lie in the teeth of her arraigners; quick to

seize the slightest sign of feebleness in their attack; protesting her

guiltlessness so loudly that she shouts truth down by brazen strength

of lung; retiring at the close with taunts; blazing throughout with

the intolerable lustre of some baleful planet. When she enters for the

third time, it is to quarrel with her paramour. He has been stung to

jealousy by a feigned love-letter. She knows that she has given him no

cause; it is her game to lure him by fidelity to marriage. Therefore

she resolves to make his mistake the instrument of her exaltation.

Beginning with torrents of abuse, hurling reproaches at him for her

own dishonour and the murder of his wife, working herself by studied

degrees into a tempest of ungovernable rage, she flings herself upon

the bed, refuses his caresses, spurns and tramples on him, till she

has brought Brachiano, terrified, humbled, fascinated, to her feet.

Then she gradually relents beneath his passionate protestations and

repeated promises of marriage. At this point she speaks but little.

We only feel her melting humour in the air, and long to see the scene

played by such an actress as Madame Bernhardt. When Vittoria next

appears, it is as Duchess by the deathbed of the Duke, her husband.

Her attendance here is necessary, but it contributes little to the

development of her character. We have learned to know her, and expect

neither womanish tears nor signs of affection at a crisis which

touches her heart less than her self-love. Webster, among his other

excellent qualities, knew how to support character by reticence.

Vittoria's silence in this act is significant; and when she retires

exclaiming, 'O me! this place is hell!' we know that it is the outcry,

not of a woman who has lost what made life dear, but of one who sees

the fruits of crime imperilled by a fatal accident. The last scene of

the play is devoted to Vittoria. It begins with a notable altercation

between her and Flamineo. She calls him 'ruffian' and 'villain,'

refusing him the reward of his vile service. This quarrel emerges in

one of Webster's grotesque contrivances to prolong a poignant

situation. Flamineo quits the stage and reappears with pistols. He

affects a kind of madness; and after threatening Vittoria, who never

flinches, he proposes they should end their lives by suicide. She

humours him, but manages to get the first shot. Flamineo falls,

wounded apparently to death. Then Vittoria turns and tramples on him

with her feet and tongue, taunting him in his death agony with the

enumeration of his crimes. Her malice and her energy are equally

infernal. Soon, however, it appears that the whole device was but a

trick of Flamineo's to test his sister. The pistol was not loaded. He

now produces a pair which are properly charged, and proceeds in good

earnest to the assassination of Vittoria. But at this critical moment

Lodovico and his masquers appear; brother and sister both die

unrepentant, defiant to the end. Vittoria's customary pride and her

familiar sneers impress her speech in these last moments with a

trenchant truth to nature:

_You_ my death's-man!

Methinks thou dost not look horrid enough,

Thou hast too good a face to be a hangman:

If thou be, do thy office in right form;

Fall down upon thy knees, and ask forgiveness!

* * * * *

I will be waited on in death; my servant

Shall never go before me.

* * * * *

Yes, I shall welcome death

As princes do some great ambassadors:

I'll meet thy weapon half-way.

* * * * *

'Twas a manly blow!

The next thou giv'st, murder some sucking infant;

And then thou wilt be famous.

So firmly has Webster wrought the character of this white devil, that

we seem to see her before us as in a picture. 'Beautiful as the

leprosy, dazzling as the lightning,' to use a phrase of her

enthusiastic admirer Hazlitt, she takes her station like a lady in

some portrait by Paris Bordone, with gleaming golden hair twisted into

snakelike braids about her temples, with skin white as cream, bright

cheeks, dark dauntless eyes, and on her bosom, where it has been

chafed by jewelled chains, a flush of rose. She is luxurious, but not

so abandoned to the pleasures of the sense as to forget the purpose of

her will and brain. Crime and peril add zest to her enjoyment. When

arraigned in open court before the judgment-seat of deadly and

unscrupulous foes, she conceals the consciousness of guilt, and stands

erect, with fierce front, unabashed, relying on the splendour of her

irresistible beauty and the subtlety of her piercing wit. Chafing with

rage, the blood mounts and adds a lustre to her cheek. It is no flush

of modesty, but of rebellious indignation. The Cardinal, who hates

her, brands her emotion with the name of shame. She rebukes him,

hurling a jibe at his own mother. And when they point with spiteful

eagerness to the jewels blazing on her breast, to the silks and satins

that she rustles in, her husband lying murdered, she retorts:

Had I foreknown his death, as you suggest, I would have

bespoke my mourning.

She is condemned, but not vanquished, and leaves the court with a

stinging sarcasm. They send her to a house of Convertites:

_V.C_. A house of Convertites! what's that?

_M_. A house of penitent whores.

_V.C_. Do the noblemen of Rome Erect it for their wives,

that I am sent To lodge there?

Charles Lamb was certainly in error? when he described Vittoria's

attitude as one of 'innocence-resembling boldness.' In the trial

scene, no less than in the scenes of altercation with Brachiano and

Flamineo, Webster clearly intended her to pass for a magnificent

vixen, a beautiful and queenly termagant. Her boldness is the audacity

of impudence, which does not condescend to entertain the thought of

guilt. Her egotism is so hard and so profound that the very victims

whom she sacrifices to ambition seem in her sight justly punished. Of

Camillo and Isabella, her husband and his wife, she says to Brachiano:

And both were struck dead by that sacred yew, In that base

shallow grave that was their due.

IV

It is tempting to pass from this analysis of Vittoria's life to a

consideration of Webster's drama as a whole, especially in a book

dedicated to Italian byways. For that mysterious man of genius had

explored the dark and devious paths of Renaissance vice, and had

penetrated the secrets of Italian wickedness with truly appalling

lucidity. His tragedies, though worthless as historical documents,

have singular value as commentaries upon history, as revelations to us

of the spirit of the sixteenth century in its deepest gloom.

Webster's plays, owing to the condensation of their thought and the

compression of their style, are not easy to read for the first time.

He crowds so many fantastic incidents into one action, and burdens his

discourse with so much profoundly studied matter, that we rise from

the perusal of his works with a blurred impression of the fables, a

deep sense of the poet's power and personality, and an ineffaceable

recollection of one or two resplendent scenes. His Roman history-play

of 'Appius and Virginia' proves that he understood the value of a

simple plot, and that he was able, when he chose, to work one out with

conscientious calmness. But the two Italian dramas upon which his fame

is justly founded, by right of which he stands alone among the

playwrights of all literatures, are marked by a peculiar and wayward

mannerism. Each part is etched with equal effort after luminous effect

upon a back-ground of lurid darkness; and the whole play is made up

of these parts, without due concentration on a master-motive. The

characters are definite in outline, but, taken together in the conduct

of a single plot, they seem to stand apart, like figures in a _tableau

vivant_; nor do they act and react each upon the other in the play of

interpenetrative passions. That this mannerism was deliberately

chosen, we have a right to believe. 'Willingly, and not ignorantly, in

this kind have I faulted,' is the answer Webster gives to such as may

object that he has not constructed his plays upon the classic model.

He seems to have had a certain sombre richness of tone and intricacy

of design in view, combining sensational effect and sententious

pregnancy of diction in works of laboured art, which, when adequately

represented to the ear and eye upon the stage, might at a touch obtain

the animation they now lack for chamber-students.

When familiarity has brought us acquainted with his style, when we

have disentangled the main characters and circumstances from their

adjuncts, we perceive that he treats poignant and tremendous

situations with a concentrated vigour special to his genius; that he

has studied each word and trait of character, and that he has prepared

by gradual approaches and degrees of horror for the culmination of his

tragedies. The sentences which seem at first sight copied from a

commonplace book, are found to be appropriate. Brief lightning flashes

of acute perception illuminate the midnight darkness of his all but

unimaginably depraved characters. Sharp unexpected touches evoke

humanity in the _fantoccini_ of his wayward art. No dramatist has

shown more consummate ability in heightening terrific effects, in

laying bare the innermost mysteries of crime, remorse, and pain,

combined to make men miserable. It has been said of Webster that,

feeling himself deficient in the first poetic qualities, he

concentrated his powers upon one point, and achieved success by sheer

force of self-cultivation. There is perhaps some truth in this. At any

rate, his genius was of a narrow and peculiar order, and he knew well

how to make the most of its limitations. Yet we must not forget that

he felt a natural bias toward the dreadful stuff with which he deals.

The mystery of iniquity had an irresistible attraction for his mind.

He was drawn to comprehend and reproduce abnormal elements of

spiritual anguish. The materials with which he builds his tragedies

are sought for in the ruined places of lost souls, in the agonies of

madness and despair, in the sarcasms of criminal and reckless atheism,

in slow tortures, griefs beyond endurance, the tempests of remorseful

death, the spasms of fratricidal bloodshed. He is often melodramatic

in the means employed to bring these psychological conditions home to

us. He makes too free use of poisoned engines, daggers, pistols,

disguised murderers, and so forth. Yet his firm grasp upon the

essential qualities of diseased and guilty human nature saves him,

even at his wildest, from the unrealities and extravagances into which

less potent artists of the _drame sanglant_--Marston, for

example--blundered.

With Webster, the tendency to brood on horrors was no result of

calculation. It belonged to his idiosyncrasy. He seems to have been

suckled from birth at the breast of that _Mater Tenebrarum_, our Lady

of Darkness, whom De Quincey in one of his 'Suspiria de Profundis'

describes among the Semnai Theai, the august goddesses, the mysterious

foster-nurses of suffering humanity. He cannot say the simplest thing

without giving it a ghastly or sinister turn. If one of his characters

draws a metaphor from pie-crust, he must needs use language of the

churchyard:

You speak as if a man

Should know what fowl is coffined in a baked meat

Afore you cut it open.

Hideous similes are heaped together in illustration of the commonest

circumstances:

Places at court are but like beds in the hospital, where

this man's head lies at that man's foot, and so lower and

lower.

When knaves come to preferment, they rise as gallowses are

raised in the Low Countries, one upon another's shoulders.

I would sooner eat a dead pigeon taken from the soles of the

feet of one sick of the plague than kiss one of you fasting.

A soldier is twitted with serving his master:

As witches do their serviceable spirits,

Even with thy prodigal blood.

An adulterous couple get this curse:

Like mistletoe on sear elms spent by weather,

Let him cleave to her, and both rot together.

A bravo is asked:

Dost thou imagine thou canst slide on blood,

And not be tainted with a shameful fall?

Or, like the black and melancholic yew-tree,

Dost think to root thyself in dead men's graves,

And yet to prosper?

It is dangerous to extract philosophy of life from any dramatist. Yet

Webster so often returns to dark and doleful meditations, that we may

fairly class him among constitutional pessimists. Men, according to

the grimness of his melancholy, are:

Only like dead walls or vaulted graves,

That, ruined, yield no echo.

O this gloomy world!

In what a shadow or deep pit of darkness

Doth womanish and fearful mankind live!

* * * * *

We are merely the stars' tennis-balls, struck and banded

Which way please them.

* * * * *

Pleasure of life! what is't? only the good hours of an ague.

A Duchess is 'brought to mortification,' before her strangling by the

executioner, in this high fantastical oration:

Thou art a box of worm-seed, at best but a salvatory of

green mummy. What's this flesh? A little crudded milk,

fantastical puff-paste, &c. &c.

Man's life in its totality is summed up with monastic cynicism in

these lyric verses:

Of what is't fools make such vain keeping?

Sin their conception, their birth weeping,

Their life a general mist of error,

Their death a hideous storm of terror.

The greatness of the world passes by with all its glory:

Vain the ambition of kings,

Who seek by trophies and dead things

To leave a living name behind,

And weave but nets to catch the wind.

It would be easy to surfeit criticism with similar examples; where

Webster is writing in sarcastic, meditative, or deliberately

terror-stirring moods. The same dark dye of his imagination shows

itself even more significantly in circumstances where, in the work of

any other artist, it would inevitably mar the harmony of the picture.

A lady, to select one instance, encourages her lover to embrace her at

the moment of his happiness. She cries:

Sir, be confident!

What is't distracts you? This is flesh and blood, sir;

'Tis not the figure cut in alabaster,

Kneels at my husband's tomb.

Yet so sustained is Webster's symphony of sombre tints, that we do not

feel this sepulchral language, this 'talk fit for a charnel' (to use

one of his own phrases), to be out of keeping. It sounds like a

presentiment of coming woes, which, as the drama grows to its

conclusion, gather and darken on the wretched victims of his bloody

plot.

It was with profound sagacity, or led by some deep-rooted instinct,

that Webster sought the fables of his two great tragedies, 'The White

Devil' and 'The Duchess of Malfi,' in Italian annals. Whether he had

visited Italy in his youth, we cannot say; for next to nothing is

known about Webster's life. But that he had gazed long and earnestly

into the mirror held up by that enchantress of the nations in his age,

is certain. Aghast and fascinated by the sins he saw there flaunting

in the light of day--sins on whose pernicious glamour Ascham, Greene,

and Howell have insisted with impressive vehemence--Webster discerned

in them the stuff he needed for philosophy and art. Withdrawing from

that contemplation, he was like a spirit 'loosed out of hell to speak

of horrors.' Deeper than any poet of the time, deeper than any even of

the Italians, he read the riddle of the sphinx of crime. He found

there something akin to his own imaginative mood, something which he

alone could fully comprehend and interpret. From the superficial

narratives of writers like Bandello he extracted a spiritual essence

which was, if not the literal, at least the ideal, truth involved in

them.

The enormous and unnatural vices, the domestic crimes of cruelty,

adultery, and bloodshed, the political scheming and the subtle arts of

vengeance, the ecclesiastical tyranny and craft, the cynical

scepticism and lustre of luxurious godlessness, which made Italy in

the midst of her refinement blaze like 'a bright and ominous star'

before the nations; these were the very elements in which the genius

of Webster--salamander-like in flame--could live and flourish. Only

the incidents of Italian history, or of French history in its

Italianated epoch, were capable of supplying him with the proper type

of plot. It was in Italy alone, or in an Italianated country, such as

England for a brief space in the reign of the first Stuart threatened

to become, that the well-nigh diabolical wickedness of his characters

might have been realised. An audience familiar with Italian novels

through Belleforest and Painter, inflamed by the long struggle of the

Reformation against the scarlet abominations of the Papal See,

outraged in their moral sense by the political paradoxes of

Machiavelli, horror-stricken at the still recent misdoings of Borgias

and Medici and Farnesi, alarmed by that Italian policy which had

conceived the massacre of S. Bartholomew in France, and infuriated by

that ecclesiastical hypocrisy which triumphed in the same; such an

audience were at the right point of sympathy with a poet who undertook

to lay the springs of Southern villany before them bare in a dramatic

action. But, as the old proverb puts it, 'Inglese Italianato è un

diavolo incarnato.' 'An Englishman assuming the Italian habit is a

devil in the flesh.' The Italians were depraved, but spiritually

feeble. The English playwright, when he brought them on the stage,

arrayed with intellectual power and gleaming with the lurid splendour

of a Northern fancy, made them tenfold darker and more terrible. To

the subtlety and vices of the South he added the melancholy,

meditation, and sinister insanity of his own climate. He deepened the

complexion of crime and intensified lawlessness by robbing the Italian

character of levity. Sin, in his conception of that character, was

complicated with the sense of sin, as it never had been in a

Florentine or a Neapolitan. He had not grasped the meaning of the

Machiavellian conscience, in its cold serenity and disengagement from

the dread of moral consequence. Not only are his villains stealthy,

frigid, quick to evil, merciless, and void of honour; but they brood

upon their crimes and analyse their motives. In the midst of their

audacity they are dogged by dread of coming retribution. At the crisis

of their destiny they look back upon their better days with

intellectual remorse. In the execution of their bloodiest schemes they

groan beneath the chains of guilt they wear, and quake before the

phantoms of their haunted brains.

Thus passion and reflection, superstition and profanity, deliberate

atrocity and fear of judgment, are united in the same nature; and to

make the complex still more strange, the play-wright has gifted these

tremendous personalities with his own wild humour and imaginative

irony. The result is almost monstrous, such an ideal of character as

makes earth hell. And yet it is not without justification. To the

Italian text has been added the Teutonic commentary, and both are

fused by a dramatic genius into one living whole.

One of these men is Flamineo, the brother of Vittoria Corombona, upon

whose part the action of the 'White Devil' depends. He has been bred

in arts and letters at the university of Padua; but being poor and of

luxurious appetites, he chooses the path of crime in courts for his

advancement. A duke adopts him for his minion, and Flamineo acts the

pander to this great man's lust. He contrives the death of his

brother-in-law, suborns a doctor to poison the Duke's wife, and

arranges secret meetings between his sister and the paramour who is to

make her fortune and his own. His mother appears like a warning Até to

prevent her daughter's crime. In his rage he cries:

What fury raised _thee_ up? Away, away!

And when she pleads the honour of their house he answers:

Shall I,

Having a path so open and so free

To my preferment, still retain your milk

In my pale forehead?

Later on, when it is necessary to remove another victim, he runs his

own brother through the body and drives his mother to madness. Yet, in

the midst of these crimes, we are unable to regard him as a simple

cut-throat. His irony and reckless courting of damnation open-eyed to

get his gust of life in this world, make him no common villain. He can

be brave as well as fierce. When the Duke insults him he bandies taunt

for taunt:

_Brach_. No, you pander?

_Flam_. What, me, my lord?

Am I your dog?

_B_. A bloodhound; do you brave, do you stand me?

_F_. Stand you! let those that have diseases run;

I need no plasters.

_B_. Would you be kicked?

_F_. Would you have your neck broke?

I tell you, duke, I am not in Russia;

My shins must be kept whole.

_B_. Do you know me?

_F_. Oh, my lord, methodically:

As in this world there are degrees of evils,

So in this world there are degrees of devils.

You're a great duke, I your poor secretary.

When the Duke dies and his prey escapes him, the rage of

disappointment breaks into this fierce apostrophe:

I cannot conjure; but if prayers or oaths. Will get the

speech of him, though forty devils Wait on him in his livery

of flames, I'll speak to him and shake him by the hand,

Though I be blasted.

As crimes thicken round him, and he still despairs of the reward for

which he sold himself, conscience awakes:

I have lived

Riotously ill, like some that live in court,

And sometimes when my face was full of smiles Have felt the

maze of conscience in my breast.

The scholar's scepticism, which lies at the root of his perversity,

finds utterance in this meditation upon death:

Whither shall I go now? O Lucian, thy ridiculous purgatory!

to find Alexander the Great cobbling shoes, Pompey tagging

points, and Julius Cæsar making hair-buttons!

Whether I resolve to fire, earth, water, air, or all the

elements by scruples, I know not, nor greatly care.

At the last moment he yet can say:

We cease to grieve, cease to be Fortune's slaves, Nay, cease

to die, by dying.

And again, with the very yielding of his spirit:

My life was a black charnel.

It will be seen that in no sense does Flamineo resemble Iago. He is

not a traitor working by craft and calculating ability to

well-considered ends. He is the desperado frantically clutching at an

uncertain and impossible satisfaction. Webster conceives him as a

self-abandoned atheist, who, maddened by poverty and tainted by

vicious living, takes a fury to his heart, and, because the goodness

of the world has been for ever lost to him, recklessly seeks the bad.

Bosola, in the 'Duchess of Malfi,' is of the same stamp. He too has

been a scholar. He is sent to the galleys 'for a notorious murder,'

and on his release he enters the service of two brothers, the Duke of

Calabria and the Cardinal of Aragon, who place him as their

intelligencer at the court of their sister.

_Bos_. It seems you would create me

One of your familiars.

_Ferd_. Familiar! what's that?

_Bos_. Why, a very quaint invisible devil in flesh,

An intelligencer.

_Ferd_. Such a kind of thriving thing

I would wish thee; and ere long thou may'st arrive

At a higher place by it.

Lured by hope of preferment, Bosola undertakes the office of spy,

tormentor, and at last of executioner. For:

Discontent and want

Is the best clay to mould a villain of.

But his true self, though subdued to be what he quaintly styles 'the

devil's quilted anvil,' on which 'all sins are fashioned and the blows

never heard,' continually rebels against this destiny. Compared with

Flamineo, he is less unnaturally criminal. His melancholy is more

fantastic, his despair more noble. Throughout the course of craft and

cruelty on which he is goaded by a relentless taskmaster, his nature,

hardened as it is, revolts.

At the end, when Bosola presents the body of the murdered Duchess to

her brother, Webster has wrought a scene of tragic savagery that

surpasses almost any other that the English stage can show. The

sight, of his dead sister maddens Ferdinand, who, feeling the eclipse

of reason gradually absorb his faculties, turns round with frenzied

hatred on the accomplice of his fratricide. Bosola demands the price

of guilt. Ferdinand spurns him with the concentrated eloquence of

despair and the extravagance of approaching insanity. The murderer

taunts his master coldly and laconically, like a man whose life is

wrecked, who has waded through blood to his reward, and who at the

last moment discovers the sacrifice of his conscience and masculine

freedom to be fruitless. Remorse, frustrated hopes, and thirst for

vengeance convert Bosola from this hour forward into an instrument of

retribution. The Duke and his brother the Cardinal are both brought to

bloody deaths by the hand which they had used to assassinate their

sister.

It is fitting that something should be said about Webster's conception

of the Italian despot. Brachiano and Ferdinand, the employers of

Flamineo and Bosola, are tyrants such as Savonarola described, and as

we read of in the chronicles of petty Southern cities. Nothing is

suffered to stand between their lust and its accomplishment. They

override the law by violence, or pervert its action to their own

advantage:

The law to him

Is like a foul black cobweb to a spider;

He makes it his dwelling and a prison

To entangle those shall feed him.

They are eaten up with parasites, accomplices, and all the creatures

of their crimes:

He and his brother are like plum-trees that grow crooked

over standing pools; they are rich and over-laden with

fruit, but none but crows, pies, and caterpillars feed on

them.

In their lives they are without a friend; for society in guilt brings

nought of comfort, and honours are but emptiness:

Glories, like glow-worms, afar off shine bright;

But looked to near, have neither heat nor light.

Their plots and counterplots drive repose far from them:

There's but three furies found in spacious hell;

But in a great man's breast three thousand dwell.

Fearful shapes afflict their fancy; shadows of ancestral crime or

ghosts of their own raising:

For these many years

None of our family dies, but there is seen

The shape of an old woman; which is given

By tradition to us to have been murdered

By her nephews for her riches.

Apparitions haunt them:

How tedious is a guilty conscience!

When I look into the fish-ponds in my garden,

Methinks I see a thing armed with a rake

That seems to strike at me.

Continually scheming against the objects of their avarice and hatred,

preparing poisons or suborning bravoes, they know that these same arts

will be employed against them. The wine-cup hides arsenic; the

headpiece is smeared with antimony; there is a dagger behind every

arras, and each shadow is a murderer's. When death comes, they meet it

trembling. What irony Webster has condensed in Brachiano's outcry:

On pain of death, let no man name death to me;

It is a word infinitely horrible.

And how solemn are the following reflections on the death of princes:

O thou soft natural death, that art joint-twin

To sweetest slumber! no rough-bearded comet

Stares on thy mild departure; the dull owl

Beats not against thy casement, the hoarse wolf

Scents not thy carrion: pity winds thy corse,

Whilst horror waits on princes.

After their death, this is their epitaph:

These wretched eminent things

Leave no more fame behind'em than should one

Fall in a frost and leave his print in snow.

Of Webster's despots, the finest in conception and the firmest in

execution is Ferdinand of Aragon. Jealousy of his sister and avarice

take possession of him and torment him like furies. The flash of

repentance over her strangled body is also the first flash of

insanity. He survives to present the spectacle of a crazed lunatic,

and to be run through the body by his paid assassin. In the Cardinal

of Aragon, Webster paints a profligate Churchman, no less voluptuous,

blood-guilty, and the rest of it, than his brother the Duke of

Calabria. It seems to have been the poet's purpose in each of his

Italian tragedies to unmask Rome as the Papal city really was. In the

lawless desperado, the intemperate tyrant, and the godless

ecclesiastic, he portrayed the three curses from which Italian society

was actually suffering.

It has been needful to dwell upon the gloomy and fantastic side of

Webster's genius. But it must not be thought that he could touch no

finer chord. Indeed, it might be said that in the domain of pathos he

is even more powerful than in that of horror. His mastery in this

region is displayed in the creation of that dignified and beautiful

woman, the Duchess of Malfi, who, with nothing in her nature, had she

but lived prosperously, to divide her from the sisterhood of gentle

ladies, walks, shrined in love and purity and conscious rectitude,

amid the snares and pitfalls of her persecutors, to die at last the

victim of a brother's fevered avarice and a desperado's egotistical

ambition. The apparatus of infernal cruelty, the dead man's hand, the

semblances of murdered sons and husband, the masque of madmen, the

dirge and doleful emblems of the tomb with which she is environed in

her prison by the torturers who seek to goad her into lunacy, are

insufficient to disturb the tranquillity and tenderness of her nature.

When the rope is being fastened to her throat, she does not spend her

breath in recriminations, but turns to the waiting-woman and says:

Farewell, Cariola!

I pray thee look thou givest my little boy

Some syrup for his cold, and let the girl

Say her prayers ere she sleep.

In the preceding scenes we have had enough, nay, over-much, of

madness, despair, and wrestling with doom. This is the calm that comes

when death is present, when the tortured soul lays down its burden of

the flesh with gladness. But Webster has not spared another touch of

thrilling pathos.

The death-struggle is over; the fratricide has rushed away, a maddened

man; the murderer is gazing with remorse upon the beautiful dead body

of his lady, wishing he had the world wherewith to buy her back to

life again; when suddenly she murmurs 'Mercy!' Our interest, already

overstrained, revives with momentary hope. But the guardians of the

grave will not be exorcised; and 'Mercy!' is the last groan of the

injured Duchess.

Webster showed great skill in his delineation of the Duchess. He had

to paint a woman in a hazardous situation: a sovereign stooping in her

widowhood to wed a servant; a lady living with the mystery of this

unequal marriage round her like a veil. He dowered her with no salient

qualities of intellect or heart or will; but he sustained our sympathy

with her, and made us comprehend her. To the last she is a Duchess;

and when she has divested state and bowed her head to enter the low

gate of heaven--too low for coronets--her poet shows us, in the lines

already quoted, that the woman still survives.

The same pathos surrounds the melancholy portrait of Isabella in

'Vittoria Corombona.' But Isabella, in that play, serves chiefly to

enhance the tyranny of her triumphant rival. The main difficulty under

which these scenes of rarest pathos would labour, were they brought

upon the stage, is their simplicity in contrast with the ghastly and

contorted horrors that envelop them. A dialogue abounding in the

passages I have already quoted--a dialogue which bandies 'O you

screech-owl!' and 'Thou foul black cloud!'--in which a sister's

admonition to her brother to think twice of suicide assumes a form so

weird as this:

I prithee, yet remember,

Millions are now in graves, which at last day

Like mandrakes shall rise shrieking.--

such a dialogue could not be rendered save by actors strung up to a

pitch of almost frenzied tension. To do full justice to what in

Webster's style would be spasmodic were it not so weighty, and at the

same time to maintain the purity of outline and melodious rhythm of

such characters as Isabella, demands no common histrionic power.

In attempting to define Webster's touch upon Italian tragic story, I

have been led perforce to concentrate attention on what is painful and

shocking to our sense of harmony in art. He was a vigorous and

profoundly imaginative playwright. But his most enthusiastic admirers

will hardly contend that good taste or moderation determined the

movement of his genius. Nor, though his insight into the essential

dreadfulness of Italian tragedy was so deep, is it possible to

maintain that his portraiture of Italian life was true to its more

superficial aspects. What place would there be for a Correggio or a

Raphael in such a world as Webster's? Yet we know that the art of

Raphael and Correggio is in exact harmony with the Italian temperament

of the same epoch which gave birth to Cesare Borgia and Bianca

Gapello. The comparatively slighter sketch of Iachimo in 'Cymbeline'

represents the Italian as he felt and lived, better than the laboured

portrait of Flamineo. Webster's Italian tragedies are consequently

true, not so much to the actual conditions of Italy, as to the moral

impression made by those conditions on a Northern imagination.

* * * * *

_AUTUMN WANDERINGS_

I.--ITALIAM PETIMUS

_Italiam Petimus!_ We left our upland home before daybreak on a clear

October morning. There had been a hard frost, spangling the meadows

with rime-crystals, which twinkled where the sun's rays touched them.

Men and women were mowing the frozen grass with thin short Alpine

scythes; and as the swathes fell, they gave a crisp, an almost

tinkling sound. Down into the gorge, surnamed of Avalanche, our horses

plunged; and there we lost the sunshine till we reached the Bear's

Walk, opening upon the vales of Albula, and Julier, and Schyn. But up

above, shone morning light upon fresh snow, and steep torrent-cloven

slopes reddening with a hundred fading plants; now and then it caught

the grey-green icicles that hung from cliffs where summer streams had

dripped. There is no colour lovelier than the blue of an autumn sky in

the high Alps, defining ridges powdered with light snow, and melting

imperceptibly downward into the warm yellow of the larches and the

crimson of the bilberry. Wiesen was radiantly beautiful: those aërial

ranges of the hills that separate Albula from Julier soared

crystal-clear above their forests; and for a foreground, on the green

fields starred with lilac crocuses, careered a group of children on

their sledges. Then came the row of giant peaks--Pitz d'Aela,

Tinzenhorn, and Michelhorn, above the deep ravine of Albula--all seen

across wide undulating golden swards, close-shaven and awaiting

winter. Carnations hung from cottage windows in full bloom, casting

sharp angular black shadows on white walls.

_Italiam petimus!_ We have climbed the valley of the Julier, following

its green, transparent torrent. A night has come and gone at Mühlen.

The stream still leads us up, diminishing in volume as we rise, up

through the fleecy mists that roll asunder for the sun, disclosing

far-off snowy ridges and blocks of granite mountains. The lifeless,

soundless waste of rock, where only thin winds whistle out of silence

and fade suddenly into still air, is passed. Then comes the descent,

with its forests of larch and cembra, golden and dark green upon a

ground of grey, and in front the serried shafts of the Bernina, and

here and there a glimpse of emerald lake at turnings of the road.

Autumn is the season for this landscape. Through the fading of

innumerable leaflets, the yellowing of larches, and something

vaporous in the low sun, it gains a colour not unlike that of the

lands we seek. By the side of the lake at Silvaplana the light was

strong and warm, but mellow. Pearly clouds hung over the Maloja, and

floating overhead cast shadows on the opaque water, which may

literally be compared to chrysoprase. The breadth of golden, brown,

and russet tints upon the valley at this moment adds softness to its

lines of level strength. Devotees of the Engadine contend that it

possesses an austere charm beyond the common beauty of Swiss

landscape; but this charm is only perfected in autumn. The fresh snow

on the heights that guard it helps. And then there are the forests of

dark pines upon those many knolls and undulating mountain-flanks

beside the lakes. Sitting and dreaming there in noonday sun, I kept

repeating to myself _Italiam petimus!_

A hurricane blew upward from the pass as we left Silvaplana, ruffling

the lake with gusts of the Italian wind. By Silz Maria we came in

sight of a dozen Italian workmen, arm linked in arm in two rows,

tramping in rhythmic stride, and singing as they went. Two of them

were such nobly built young men, that for a moment the beauty of the

landscape faded from my sight, and I was saddened. They moved to their

singing, like some of Mason's or Frederick Walker's figures, with the

free grace of living statues, and laughed as we drove by. And yet,

with all their beauty, industry, sobriety, intelligence, these

Italians of the northern valleys serve the sterner people of the

Grisons like negroes, doing their roughest work at scanty wages.

So we came to the vast Alpine wall, and stood on a bare granite slab,

and looked over into Italy, as men might lean from the battlements of

a fortress. Behind lies the Alpine valley, grim, declining slowly

northward, with wind-lashed lakes and glaciers sprawling from

storm-broken pyramids of gneiss. Below spread the unfathomable depths

that lead to Lombardy, flooded with sunlight, filled with swirling

vapour, but never wholly hidden from our sight. For the blast kept

shifting the cloud-masses, and the sun streamed through in spears and

bands of sheeny rays. Over the parapet our horses dropped, down

through sable spruce and amber larch, down between tangles of rowan

and autumnal underwood. Ever as we sank, the mountains rose--those

sharp embattled precipices, toppling spires, impendent chasms blurred

with mist, that make the entrance into Italy sublime. Nowhere do the

Alps exhibit their full stature, their commanding puissance, with such

majesty as in the gates of Italy; and of all those gates I think there

is none to compare with Maloja, none certainly to rival it in

abruptness of initiation into the Italian secret. Below Vico Soprano

we pass already into the violets and blues of Titian's landscape. Then

come the purple boulders among chestnut trees; then the double

dolomite-like peak of Pitz Badin and Promontogno.

It is sad that words can do even less than painting could to bring

this window-scene at Promontogno before another eye. The casement just

frames it. In the foreground are meadow slopes, thinly, capriciously

planted with chestnut trees and walnuts, each standing with its shadow

cast upon the sward. A little farther falls the torrent, foaming down

between black jaws of rain-stained granite, with the wooden buildings

of a rustic mill set on a ledge of rock. Suddenly above this landscape

soars the valley, clothing its steep sides on either hand with pines;

and there are emerald isles of pasture on the wooded flanks; and then

cliffs, where the red-stemmed larches glow; and at the summit,

shooting into ether with a swathe of mist around their basement, soar

the double peaks, the one a pyramid, the other a bold broken crystal

not unlike the Finsteraarhorn seen from Furka. These are connected by

a snowy saddle, and snow is lying on their inaccessible crags in

powdery drifts. Sunlight pours between them into the ravine. The green

and golden forests now join from either side, and now recede,

according as the sinuous valley brings their lines together or

disparts them. There is a sound of cow-bells on the meadows; and the

roar of the stream is dulled or quickened as the gusts of this October

wind sweep by or slacken. _Italiam petimus!_

_Tangimus Italiam!_ Chiavenna is a worthy key to this great gate

Italian. We walked at night in the open galleries of the cathedral

cloister--white, smoothly curving, well-proportioned loggie, enclosing

a green space, whence soars the campanile to the stars. The moon had

sunk, but her light still silvered the mountains that stand at watch

round Chiavenna; and the castle rock was flat and black against that

dreamy background. Jupiter, who walked so lately for us on the long

ridge of the Jacobshorn above our pines, had now an ample space of sky

over Lombardy to light his lamp in. Why is it, we asked each other, as

we smoked our pipes and strolled, my friend and I;--why is it that

Italian beauty does not leave the spirit so untroubled as an Alpine

scene? Why do we here desire the flower of some emergent feeling to

grow from the air, or from the soil, or from humanity to greet us?

This sense of want evoked by Southern beauty is perhaps the antique

mythopœic yearning. But in our perplexed life it takes another form,

and seems the longing for emotion, ever fleeting, ever new,

unrealised, unreal, insatiable.

II.--OVER THE APENNINES

At Parma we slept in the Albergo della Croce Bianca, which is more a

bric-à-brac shop than an inn; and slept but badly, for the good folk

of Parma twanged guitars and exercised their hoarse male voices all

night in the street below. We were glad when Christian called us, at 5

A.M., for an early start across the Apennines. This was the day of a

right Roman journey. In thirteen and a half hours, leaving Parma at 6,

and arriving in Sarzana at 7.30, we flung ourselves across the spine

of Italy, from the plains of Eridanus to the seashore of Etruscan

Luna. I had secured a carriage and extra post-horses the night before;

therefore we found no obstacles upon the road, but eager drivers,

quick relays, obsequious postmasters, change, speed, perpetual

movement. The road itself is a noble one, and nobly entertained in all

things but accommodation for travellers. At Berceto, near the summit

of the pass, we stopped just half an hour, to lunch off a mouldy hen

and six eggs; but that was all the halt we made.

As we drove out of Parma, striking across the plain to the _ghiara_ of

the Taro, the sun rose over the austere autumnal landscape, with its

withered vines and crimson haws. Christian, the mountaineer, who at

home had never seen the sun rise from a flat horizon, stooped from the

box to call attention to this daily recurring miracle, which on the

plain of Lombardy is no less wonderful than on a rolling sea. From the

village of Fornovo, where the Italian League was camped awaiting

Charles VIII. upon that memorable July morn in 1495, the road strikes

suddenly aside, gains a spur of the descending Apennines, and keeps

this vantage till the pass of La Cisa is reached. Many windings are

occasioned by thus adhering to arêtes, but the total result is a

gradual ascent with free prospect over plain and mountain. The

Apennines, built up upon a smaller scale than the Alps, perplexed in

detail and entangled with cross sections and convergent systems, lend

themselves to this plan of carrying highroads along their ridges

instead of following the valley.

What is beautiful in the landscape of that northern watershed is the

subtlety, delicacy, variety, and intricacy of the mountain outlines.

There is drawing wherever the eye falls. Each section of the vast

expanse is a picture of tossed crests and complicated undulations. And

over the whole sea of stationary billows, light is shed like an

ethereal raiment, with spare colour--blue and grey, and parsimonious

green--in the near foreground. The detail is somewhat dry and

monotonous; for these so finely moulded hills are made up of washed

earth, the immemorial wrecks of earlier mountain ranges. Brown

villages, not unlike those of Midland England, low houses built of

stone and tiled with stone, and square-towered churches, occur at rare

intervals in cultivated hollows, where there are fields and fruit

trees. Water is nowhere visible except in the wasteful river-beds. As

we rise, we break into a wilder country, forested with oak, where oxen

and goats are browsing. The turf is starred with lilac gentian and

crocus bells, but sparely. Then comes the highest village, Berceto,

with keen Alpine air. After that, broad rolling downs of yellowing

grass and russet beech-scrub lead onward to the pass La Cisa. The

sense of breadth in composition is continually satisfied through this

ascent by the fine-drawn lines, faint tints, and immense air-spaces of

Italian landscape. Each little piece reminds one of England; but the

geographical scale is enormously more grandiose, and the effect of

majesty proportionately greater.

From La Cisa the road descends suddenly; for the southern escarpment

of the Apennine, as of the Alpine, barrier is pitched at a far steeper

angle than the northern. Yet there is no view of the sea. That is

excluded by the lower hills which hem the Magra. The upper valley is

beautiful, with verdant lawns and purple hillsides breaking down into

thick chestnut woods, through which we wound at a rapid pace for

nearly an hour. The leaves were still green, mellowing to golden; but

the fruit was ripe and heavy, ready at all points to fall. In the

still October air the husks above our heads would loosen, and the

brown nuts rustle through the foliage, and with a dull short thud,

like drops of thunder-rain, break down upon the sod. At the foot of

this rich forest, wedged in between huge buttresses, we found

Pontremoli, and changed our horses here for the last time. It was

Sunday, and the little town was alive with country-folk; tall stalwart

fellows wearing peacock's feathers in their black slouched hats, and

nut-brown maids.

From this point the valley of the Magra is exceeding rich with fruit

trees, vines, and olives. The tendrils of the vine are yellow now, and

in some places hued like generous wine; through their thick leaves the

sun shot crimson. In one cool garden, as the day grew dusk, I noticed

quince trees laden with pale fruit entangled with pomegranates--green

spheres and ruddy amid burnished leaves. By the roadside too were many

berries of bright hues; the glowing red of haws and hips, the amber of

the pyracanthus, the rose tints of the spindle-wood. These make autumn

even lovelier than spring. And then there was a wood of chestnuts

carpeted with pale pinkling, a place to dream of in the twilight. But

the main motive of this landscape was the indescribable Carrara range,

an island of pure form and shooting peaks, solid marble, crystalline

in shape and texture, faintly blue against the blue sky, from which

they were but scarce divided. These mountains close the valley to

south-east, and seem as though they belonged to another and more

celestial region.

Soon the sunlight was gone, and moonrise came to close the day, as we

rolled onward to Sarzana, through arundo donax and vine-girdled olive

trees and villages, where contadini lounged upon the bridges. There

was a stream of sound in our ears, and in my brain a rhythmic dance of

beauties caught through the long-drawn glorious golden autumn-day.

III.--FOSDINOVO

The hamlet and the castle of Fosdinovo stand upon a mountain-spur

above Sarzana, commanding the valley of the Magra and the plains of

Luni. This is an ancient fief of the Malaspina House, and is still in

the possession of the Marquis of that name.

The road to Fosdinovo strikes across the level through an avenue of

plane trees, shedding their discoloured leaves. It then takes to the

open fields, bordered with tall reeds waving from the foss on either

hand, where grapes are hanging to the vines. The country-folk allow

their vines to climb into the olives, and these golden festoons are a

great ornament to the grey branches. The berries on the trees are

still quite green, and it is a good olive season. Leaving the main

road, we pass a villa of the Malaspini, shrouded in immense thickets

of sweet bay and ilex, forming a grove for the Nymphs or Pan. Here may

you see just such clean stems and lucid foliage as Gian Bellini

painted, inch by inch, in his Peter Martyr picture. The place is

neglected now; the semicircular seats of white Carrara marble are

stained with green mosses, the altars chipped, the fountains choked

with bay leaves; and the rose trees, escaped from what were once trim

garden alleys, have gone wandering a-riot into country hedges. There

is no demarcation between the great man's villa and the neighbouring

farms. From this point the path rises, and the barren hillside is

a-bloom with late-flowering myrtles. Why did the Greeks consecrate

these myrtle-rods to Death as well as Love? Electra complained that

her father's tomb had not received the honour of the myrtle branch;

and the Athenians wreathed their swords with myrtle in memory of

Harmodius. Thinking of these matters, I cannot but remember lines of

Greek, which have themselves the rectitude and elasticity of myrtle

wands:

(Greek:)

kai prospesôn eklaus' erêmias tuchôn

spondas te lusas askon hon pherô xenois

espeisa tumbô d'amphethêka mursinas.

As we approach Fosdinovo, the hills above us gain sublimity; the

prospect over plain and sea--the fields where Luna was, the widening

bay of Spezzia--grows ever grander. The castle is a ruin, still

capable of partial habitation, and now undergoing repair--the state in

which a ruin looks most sordid and forlorn. How strange it is, too,

that, to enforce this sense of desolation, sad dishevelled weeds cling

ever to such antique masonry! Here are the henbane, the sow-thistle,

the wild cucumber. At Avignon, at Orvieto, at Dolce Acqua, at Les

Baux, we never missed them. And they have the dusty courtyards, the

massive portals, where portcullises still threaten, of Fosdinovo to

themselves. Over the gate, and here and there on corbels, are carved

the arms of Malaspina--a barren thorn-tree, gnarled with the

geometrical precision of heraldic irony.

Leaning from the narrow windows of this castle, with the spacious view

to westward, I thought of Dante. For Dante in this castle was the

guest of Moroello Malaspina, what time he was yet finishing the

'Inferno.' There is a little old neglected garden, full to south,

enclosed upon a rampart which commands the Borgo, where we found frail

canker-roses and yellow amaryllis. Here, perhaps, he may have sat

with ladies--for this was the Marchesa's pleasaunce; or may have

watched through a short summer's night, until he saw that _tremolar

della marina_, portending dawn, which afterwards he painted in the

'Purgatory.'

From Fosdinovo one can trace the Magra work its way out seaward, not

into the plain where once the _candentia moenia Lunae_ flashed sunrise

from their battlements, but close beside the little hills which back

the southern arm of the Spezzian gulf. At the extreme end of that

promontory, called Del Corvo, stood the Benedictine convent of S.

Croce; and it was here in 1309, if we may trust to tradition, that

Dante, before his projected journey into France, appeared and left the

first part of his poem with the Prior. Fra Ilario, such was the good

father's name, received commission to transmit the 'Inferno' to

Uguccione della Faggiuola; and he subsequently recorded the fact of

Dante's visit in a letter which, though its genuineness has been

called in question, is far too interesting to be left without

allusion. The writer says that on occasion of a journey into lands

beyond the Riviera, Dante visited this convent, appearing silent and

unknown among the monks. To the Prior's question what he wanted, he

gazed upon the brotherhood, and only answered, 'Peace!' Afterwards, in

private conversation, he communicated his name and spoke about his

poem. A portion of the 'Divine Comedy' composed in the Italian tongue

aroused Ilario's wonder, and led him to inquire why his guest had not

followed the usual course of learned poets by committing his thoughts

to Latin. Dante replied that he had first intended to write in that

language, and that he had gone so far as to begin the poem in

Virgilian hexameters. Reflection upon the altered conditions of

society in that age led him, however, to reconsider the matter; and he

was resolved to tune another lyre, 'suited to the sense of modern

men.' 'For,' said he, 'it is idle to set solid food before the lips

of sucklings.'

If we can trust Fra Ilario's letter as a genuine record, which is

unhappily a matter of some doubt, we have in this narration not only a

picturesque, almost a melodramatically picturesque glimpse of the

poet's apparition to those quiet monks in their seagirt house of

peace, but also an interesting record of the destiny which presided

over the first great work of literary art in a distinctly modern

language.

IV.--LA SPEZZIA

While we were at Fosdinovo the sky filmed over, and there came a halo

round the sun. This portended change; and by evening, after we had

reached La Spezzia, earth, sea, and air were conscious of a coming

tempest. At night I went down to the shore, and paced the sea-wall

they have lately built along the Rada. The moon was up, but overdriven

with dry smoky clouds, now thickening to blackness over the whole bay,

now leaving intervals through which the light poured fitfully and

fretfully upon the wrinkled waves; and ever and anon they shuddered

with electric gleams which were not actual lightning. Heaven seemed to

be descending on the sea; one might have fancied that some powerful

charms were drawing down the moon with influence malign upon those

still resisting billows. For not as yet the gulf was troubled to its

depth, and not as yet the breakers dashed in foam against the

moonlight-smitten promontories. There was but an uneasy murmuring of

wave to wave; a whispering of wind, that stooped its wing and hissed

along the surface, and withdrew into the mystery of clouds again; a

momentary chafing of churned water round the harbour piers, subsiding

into silence petulant and sullen. I leaned against an iron stanchion

and longed for the sea's message. But nothing came to me, and the

drowned secret of Shelley's death those waves which were his grave

revealed not.

Howler and scooper of storms! capricious and dainty sea!

Meanwhile the incantation swelled in shrillness, the electric shudders

deepened. Alone in this elemental overture to tempest I took no note

of time, but felt, through self-abandonment to the symphonic

influence, how sea and air, and clouds akin to both, were dealing with

each other complainingly, and in compliance to some maker of unrest

within them. A touch upon my shoulder broke this trance; I turned and

saw a boy beside me in a coastguard's uniform. Francesco was on patrol

that night; but my English accent soon assured him that I was no

_contrabbandiere_, and he too leaned against the stanchion and told me

his short story. He was in his nineteenth year, and came from

Florence, where his people live in the Borgo Ognissanti. He had all

the brightness of the Tuscan folk, a sort of innocent malice mixed

with _espieglerie_. It was diverting to see the airs he gave himself

on the strength of his new military dignity, his gun, and uniform, and

night duty on the shore. I could not help humming to myself _Non più

andrai_; for Francesco was a sort of Tuscan Cherubino. We talked about

picture galleries and libraries in Florence, and I had to hear his

favourite passages from the Italian poets. And then there came the

plots of Jules Verne's stories and marvellous narrations about _l'

uomo cavallo, l' uomo volante, l' uomo pesce_. The last of these

personages turned out to be Paolo Boÿnton (so pronounced), who had

swam the Arno in his diving dress, passing the several bridges, and

when he came to the great weir 'allora tutti stare con bocca aperta.'

Meanwhile the storm grew serious, and our conversation changed.

Francesco told me about the terrible sun-stricken sand shores of the

Riviera, burning in summer noon, over which the coast-guard has to

tramp, their perils from falling stones in storm, and the trains that

come rushing from those narrow tunnels on the midnight line of march.

It is a hard life; and the thirst for adventure which drove this

boy--'il più matto di tutta la famiglia'--to adopt it, seems well-nigh

quenched. And still, with a return to Giulio Verne, he talked

enthusiastically of deserting, of getting on board a merchant ship,

and working his way to southern islands where wonders are.

A furious blast swept the whole sky for a moment almost clear. The

moonlight fell, with racing cloud-shadows, upon sea and hills, the

lights of Lerici, the great _fanali_ at the entrance of the gulf, and

Francesco's upturned handsome face. Then all again was whirled in mist

and foam; one breaker smote the sea wall in a surge of froth, another

plunged upon its heels; with inconceivable swiftness came rain;

lightning deluged the expanse of surf, and showed the windy trees bent

landward by the squall. It was long past midnight now, and the storm

was on us for the space of three days.

V.--PORTO VENERE

For the next three days the wind went worrying on, and a line of surf

leapt on the sea-wall always to the same height. The hills all around

were inky black and weary.

At night the wild libeccio still rose, with floods of rain and

lightning poured upon the waste. I thought of the Florentine patrol.

Is he out in it, and where?

At last there came a lull. When we rose on the fourth morning, the

sky was sulky, spent and sleepy after storm--the air as soft and tepid

as boiled milk or steaming flannel. We drove along the shore to Porto

Venere, passing the arsenals and dockyards, which have changed the

face of Spezzia since Shelley knew it. This side of the gulf is not so

rich in vegetation as the other, probably because it lies open to the

winds from the Carrara mountains. The chestnuts come down to the shore

in many places, bringing with them the wild mountain-side. To make up

for this lack of luxuriance, the coast is furrowed with a succession

of tiny harbours, where the fishing-boats rest at anchor. There are

many villages upon the spurs of hills, and on the headlands naval

stations, hospitals, lazzaretti, and prisons. A prickly bindweed (the

_Smilax Sarsaparilla_) forms a feature in the near landscape, with its

creamy odoriferous blossoms, coral berries, and glossy thorned leaves.

A turn of the road brought Porto Venere in sight, and on its grey

walls flashed a gleam of watery sunlight. The village consists of one

long narrow street, the houses on the left side hanging sheer above

the sea. Their doors at the back open on to cliffs which drop about

fifty feet upon the water. A line of ancient walls, with mediaeval

battlements and shells of chambers suspended midway between earth and

sky, runs up the rock behind the town; and this wall is pierced with a

deep gateway above which the inn is piled. We had our lunch in a room

opening upon the town-gate, adorned with a deep-cut Pisan arch

enclosing images and frescoes--a curious episode in a place devoted to

the jollity of smugglers and seafaring folk. The whole house was such

as Tintoretto loved to paint--huge wooden rafters; open chimneys with

pent-house canopies of stone, where the cauldrons hung above logs of

chestnut; rude low tables spread with coarse linen embroidered at the

edges, and laden with plates of fishes, fruit, quaint glass,

big-bellied jugs of earthenware, and flasks of yellow wine. The people

of the place were lounging round in lazy attitudes. There were odd

nooks and corners everywhere; unexpected staircases with windows

slanting through the thickness of the town-wall; pictures of saints;

high-zoned serving women, on whose broad shoulders lay big coral

beads; smoke-blackened roofs, and balconies that opened on the sea.

The house was inexhaustible in motives for pictures.

We walked up the street, attended by a rabble rout of boys--_diavoli

scatenati_--clean, grinning, white-teethed, who kept incessantly

shouting, 'Soldo, soldo!' I do not know why these sea-urchins are so

far more irrepressible than their land brethren. But it is always thus

in Italy. They take an imperturbable delight in noise and mere

annoyance. I shall never forget the sea-roar of Porto Venere, with

that shrill obligate, 'Soldo, soldo, soldo!' rattling like a dropping

fire from lungs of brass.

At the end of Porto Venere is a withered and abandoned city, climbing

the cliffs of S. Pietro; and on the headland stands the ruined church,

built by Pisans with alternate rows of white and black marble, upon

the site of an old temple of Venus. This is a modest and pure piece of

Gothic architecture, fair in desolation, refined and dignified, and

not unworthy in its grace of the dead Cyprian goddess. Through its

broken lancets the sea-wind whistles and the vast reaches of the

Tyrrhene gulf are seen. Samphire sprouts between the blocks of marble,

and in sheltered nooks the caper hangs her beautiful purpureal snowy

bloom.

The headland is a bold block of white limestone stained with red. It

has the pitch of Exmoor stooping to the sea near Lynton. To north, as

one looks along the coast, the line is broken by Porto Fino's

amethystine promontory; and in the vaporous distance we could trace

the Riviera mountains, shadowy and blue. The sea came roaring, rolling

in with tawny breakers; but, far out, it sparkled in pure azure, and

the cloud-shadows over it were violet. Where Corsica should have been

seen, soared banks of fleecy, broad-domed alabaster clouds.

This point, once dedicated to Venus, now to Peter--both, be it

remembered, fishers of men--is one of the most singular in Europe. The

island of Palmaria, rich in veined marbles, shelters the port; so that

outside the sea rages, while underneath the town, reached by a narrow

strait, there is a windless calm. It was not without reason that our

Lady of Beauty took this fair gulf to herself; and now that she has

long been dispossessed, her memory lingers yet in names. For Porto

Venere remembers her, and Lerici is only Eryx. There is a grotto here,

where an inscription tells us that Byron once 'tempted the Ligurian

waves.' It is just such a natural sea-cave as might have inspired

Euripides when he described the refuge of Orestes in 'Iphigenia.'

VI.--LERICI

Libeccio at last had swept the sky clear. The gulf was ridged with

foam-fleeced breakers, and the water churned into green, tawny wastes.

But overhead there flew the softest clouds, all silvery, dispersed in

flocks. It is the day for pilgrimage to what was Shelley's home.

After following the shore a little way, the road to Lerici breaks into

the low hills which part La Spezzia from Sarzana. The soil is red, and

overgrown with arbutus and pinaster, like the country around Cannes.

Through the scattered trees it winds gently upwards, with frequent

views across the gulf, and then descends into a land rich with

olives--a genuine Riviera landscape, where the mountain-slopes are

hoary, and spikelets of innumerable light-flashing leaves twinkle

against a blue sea, misty-deep. The walls here are not unfrequently

adorned with basreliefs of Carrara marble--saints and madonnas very

delicately wrought, as though they were love-labours of sculptors who

had passed a summer on this shore. San Terenzio is soon discovered low

upon the sands to the right, nestling under little cliffs; and then

the high-built castle of Lerici comes in sight, looking across, the bay

to Porto Venere--one Aphrodite calling to the other, with the foam

between. The village is piled around its cove with tall and

picturesquely coloured houses; the molo and the fishing-boats lie just

beneath the castle. There is one point of the descending carriage road

where all this gracefulness is seen, framed by the boughs of olive

branches, swaying, wind-ruffled, laughing the many-twinkling smiles of

ocean back from their grey leaves. Here _Erycina ridens_ is at home.

And, as we stayed to dwell upon the beauty of the scene, came women

from the bay below--barefooted, straight as willow wands, with

burnished copper bowls upon their heads. These women have the port of

goddesses, deep-bosomed, with the length of thigh and springing ankles

that betoken strength no less than elasticity and grace. The hair of

some of them was golden, rippling in little curls around brown brows

and glowing eyes. Pale lilac blent with orange on their dress, and

coral beads hung from their ears.

At Lerici we took a boat and pushed into the rolling breakers.

Christian now felt the movement of the sea for the first time. This

was rather a rude trial, for the grey-maned monsters played, as it

seemed, at will with our cockle-shell, tumbling in dolphin curves to

reach the shore. Our boatmen knew all about Shelley and the Casa

Magni. It is not at Lerici, but close to San Terenzio, upon the south

side of the village. Looking across the bay from the molo, one could

clearly see its square white mass, tiled roof, and terrace built on

rude arcades with a broad orange awning. Trelawny's description hardly

prepares one for so considerable a place. I think the English exiles

of that period must have been exacting if the Casa Magni seemed to

them no better than a bathing-house.

We left our boat at the jetty, and walked through some gardens to the

villa. There we were kindly entertained by the present occupiers,

who, when I asked them whether such visits as ours were not a great

annoyance, gently but feelingly replied: 'It is not so bad now as it

used to be.' The English gentleman who rents the Casa Magni has known

it uninterruptedly since Shelley's death, and has used it for

_villeggiatura_ during the last thirty years. We found him in the

central sitting-room, which readers of Trelawny's 'Recollections' have

so often pictured to themselves. The large oval table, the settees

round the walls, and some of the pictures are still unchanged. As we

sat talking, I laughed to think of that luncheon party, when Shelley

lost his clothes, and came naked, dripping with sea-water, into the

room, protected by the skirts of the sympathising waiting-maid. And

then I wondered where they found him on the night when he stood

screaming in his sleep, after the vision of his veiled self, with its

question, '_Siete soddisfatto_?'

There were great ilexes behind the house in Shelley's time, which have

been cut down, and near these he is said to have sat and written the

'Triumph of Life.' Some new houses, too, have been built between the

villa and the town; otherwise the place is unaltered. Only an awning

has been added to protect the terrace from the sun. I walked out on

this terrace, where Shelley used to listen to Jane's singing. The sea

was fretting at its base, just as Mrs. Shelley says it did when the

Don Juan disappeared.

From San Terenzio we walked back to Lerici through olive woods,

attended by a memory which toned the almost overpowering beauty of the

place to sadness.

VII.--VIAREGGIO

The same memory drew us, a few days later, to the spot where

Shelley's body was burned. Viareggio is fast becoming a fashionable

watering-place for the people of Florence and Lucca, who seek fresher

air and simpler living than Livorno offers. It has the usual new inns

and improvised lodging-houses of such places, built on the outskirts

of a little fishing village, with a boundless stretch of noble sands.

There is a wooden pier on which we walked, watching the long roll of

waves, foam-flaked, and quivering with moonlight. The Apennines faded

into the grey sky beyond, and the sea-wind was good to breathe. There

is a feeling of 'immensity, liberty, action' here, which is not common

in Italy. It reminds us of England; and to-night the Mediterranean had

the rough force of a tidal sea.

Morning revealed beauty enough in Viareggio to surprise even one who

expects from Italy all forms of loveliness. The sand-dunes stretch for

miles between the sea and a low wood of stone pines, with the Carrara

hills descending from their glittering pinnacles by long lines to the

headlands of the Spezzian Gulf. The immeasurable distance was all

painted in sky-blue and amethyst; then came the golden green of the

dwarf firs; and then dry yellow in the grasses of the dunes; and then

the many-tinted sea, with surf tossed up against the furthest cliffs.

It is a wonderful and tragic view, to which no painter but the Roman

Costa has done justice; and he, it may be said, has made this

landscape of the Carrarese his own. The space between sand and

pine-wood was covered with faint, yellow, evening primroses. They

flickered like little harmless flames in sun and shadow, and the

spires of the Carrara range were giant flames transformed to marble.

The memory of that day described by Trelawny in a passage of immortal

English prose, when he and Byron and Leigh Hunt stood beside the

funeral pyre, and libations were poured, and the 'Cor Cordium' was

found inviolate among the ashes, turned all my thoughts to flame

beneath the gentle autumn sky.

Still haunted by these memories, we took the carriage road to Pisa,

over which Shelley's friends had hurried to and fro through those last

days. It passes an immense forest of stone-pines--aisles and avenues;

undergrowth of ilex, laurustinus, gorse, and myrtle; the crowded

cyclamens, the solemn silence of the trees; the winds hushed in their

velvet roof and stationary domes of verdure.

* * * * *

_PARMA_

Parma is perhaps the brightest _Residenzstadt_ of the second class in

Italy. Built on a sunny and fertile tract of the Lombard plain, within

view of the Alps, and close beneath the shelter of the Apennines, it

shines like a well-set gem with stately towers and cheerful squares in

the midst of verdure. The cities of Lombardy are all like large

country houses: walking out of their gates, you seem to be stepping

from a door or window that opens on a trim and beautiful garden, where

mulberry-tree is married to mulberry by festoons of vines, and where

the maize and sunflower stand together in rows between patches of flax

and hemp. But it is not in order to survey the union of well-ordered

husbandry with the civilities of ancient city-life that we break the

journey at Parma between Milan and Bologna. We are attracted rather by

the fame of one great painter, whose work, though it may be studied

piecemeal in many galleries of Europe, in Parma has a fulness,

largeness, and mastery that can nowhere else be found. In Parma alone

Correggio challenges comparison with Raphael, with Tintoret, with all

the supreme decorative painters who have deigned to make their art the

handmaid of architecture. Yet even in the cathedral and the church of

S. Giovanni, where Correggio's frescoes cover cupola and chapel wall,

we could scarcely comprehend his greatness now--so cruelly have time

and neglect dealt with those delicate dream-shadows of celestial

fairyland--were it not for an interpreter, who consecrated a lifetime

to the task of translating his master's poetry of fresco into the

prose of engraving. That man was Paolo Toschi--a name to be ever

venerated by all lovers of the arts; since without his guidance we

should hardly know what to seek for in the ruined splendours of the

domes of Parma, or even seeking, how to find the object of our search.

Toschi's labour was more effectual than that of a restorer however

skilful, more loving than that of a follower however faithful. He

respected Correggio's handiwork with religious scrupulousness, adding

not a line or tone or touch of colour to the fading frescoes; but he

lived among them, aloft on scaffoldings, and face to face with the

originals which he designed to reproduce. By long and close

familiarity, by obstinate and patient interrogation, he divined

Correggio's secret, and was able at last to see clearly through the

mist of cobweb and mildew and altar smoke, and through the still more

cruel travesty of so-called restoration. What he discovered, he

faithfully committed first to paper in water colours, and then to

copperplate with the burin, so that we enjoy the privilege of seeing

Correggio's masterpieces as Toschi saw them, with the eyes of genius

and of love and of long scientific study. It is not too much to say

that some of Correggio's most charming compositions--for example, the

dispute of S. Augustine and S. John--have been resuscitated from the

grave by Toschi's skill. The original offers nothing but a mouldering

surface from which the painter's work has dropped in scales. The

engraving presents a design which we doubt not was Correggio's, for it

corresponds in all particulars to the style and spirit of the master.

To be critical in dealing with so successful an achievement of

restoration and translation is difficult. Yet it may be admitted once

and for all that Toschi has not unfrequently enfeebled his original.

Under his touch Correggio loses somewhat of his sensuous audacity, his

dithyrambic ecstasy, and approaches the ordinary standard of

prettiness and graceful beauty. The Diana of the Camera di S. Paolo,

for instance, has the strong calm splendour of a goddess: the same

Diana in Toschi's engraving seems about to smile with girlish joy. In

a word, the engraver was a man of a more common stamp--more timid and

more conventional than the painter. But this is after all a trifling

deduction from the value of his work.

Our debt to Paolo Toschi is such that it would be ungrateful not to

seek some details of his life. The few that can be gathered even at

Parma are brief and bald enough. The newspaper articles and funeral

panegyrics which refer to him are as barren as all such occasional

notices in Italy have always been; the panegyrist seeming more anxious

about his own style than eager to communicate information. Yet a bare

outline of Toschi's biography may be supplied. He was born at Parma in

1788. His father was cashier of the post-office, and his mother's name

was Anna Maria Brest. Early in his youth he studied painting at Parma

under Biagio Martini; and in 1809 he went to Paris, where he learned

the art of engraving from Bervic and of etching from Oortman. In Paris

he contracted an intimate friendship with the painter Gérard. But

after ten years he returned to Parma, where he established a company

and school of engravers in concert with his friend Antonio Isac. Maria

Louisa, the then Duchess, under whose patronage the arts flourished at

Parma (witness Bodoni's exquisite typography), soon recognised his

merit, and appointed him Director of the Ducal Academy. He then formed

the project of engraving a series of the whole of Correggio's

frescoes. The undertaking was a vast one. Both the cupolas of S. John

and the cathedral, together with the vault of the apse of S.

Giovanni[10] and various portions of the side aisles, and the

so-called Camera di S. Paolo, are covered by frescoes of Correggio and

his pupil Parmegiano. These frescoes have suffered so much from

neglect and time, and from unintelligent restoration, that it is

difficult in many cases to determine their true character. Yet Toschi

did not content himself with selections, or shrink from the task of

deciphering and engraving the whole. He formed a school of disciples,

among whom were Carlo Raimondi of Milan, Antonio Costa of Venice,

Edward Eichens of Berlin, Aloisio Juvara of Naples, Antonio Dalcò,

Giuseppe Magnani, and Lodovico Bisola of Parma, and employed them as

assistants in his work. Death overtook him in 1854, before it was

finished, and now the water-colour drawings which are exhibited in the

Gallery of Parma prove to what extent the achievement fell short of

his design. Enough, however, was accomplished to place the chief

masterpieces of Correggio beyond the possibility of utter oblivion.

To the piety of his pupil Carlo Raimondi, the bearer of a name

illustrious in the annals of engraving, we owe a striking portrait of

Toschi. The master is represented on his seat upon the scaffold in the

dizzy half-light of the dome. The shadowy forms of saints and angels

are around him. He has raised his eyes from his cartoon to study one

of these. In his right hand is the opera-glass with which he

scrutinises the details of distant groups. The upturned face, with its

expression of contemplative intelligence, is like that of an

astronomer accustomed to commerce with things above the sphere of

common life, and ready to give account of all that he has gathered

from his observation of a world not ours. In truth the world created

by Correggio and interpreted by Toschi is very far removed from that

of actual existence. No painter has infused a more distinct

individuality into his work, realising by imaginative force and

powerful projection an order of beauty peculiar to himself, before

which it is impossible to remain quite indifferent. We must either

admire the manner of Correggio, or else shrink from it with the

distaste which sensual art is apt to stir in natures of a severe or

simple type.

What, then, is the Correggiosity of Correggio? In other words, what is

the characteristic which, proceeding from the personality of the

artist, is impressed on all his work? The answer to this question,

though by no means simple, may perhaps be won by a process of gradual

analysis. The first thing that strikes us in the art of Correggio is,

that he has aimed at the realistic representation of pure unrealities.

His saints and angels are beings the like of whom we have hardly seen

upon the earth. Yet they are displayed before us with all the movement

and the vivid truth of nature. Next we feel that what constitutes the

superhuman, visionary quality of these creatures, is their uniform

beauty of a merely sensuous type. They are all created for pleasure,

not for thought or passion or activity or heroism. The uses of their

brains, their limbs, their every feature, end in enjoyment; innocent

and radiant wantonness is the condition of their whole existence.

Correggio conceived the universe under the one mood of sensuous joy:

his world was bathed in luxurious light; its inhabitants were capable

of little beyond a soft voluptuousness. Over the domain of tragedy he

had no sway, and very rarely did he attempt to enter on it: nothing,

for example, can be feebler than his endeavour to express anguish in

the distorted features of Madonna, S. John, and the Magdalen, who are

bending over the dead body of a Christ extended in the attitude of

languid repose. In like manner he could not deal with subjects which

demand a pregnancy of intellectual meaning. He paints the three Fates

like young and joyous Bacchantes, places rose-garlands and

thyrsi in their hands instead of the distaff and the thread of human

destinies, and they might figure appropriately upon the panels of a

banquet-chamber in Pompeii. In this respect Correggio might be termed

the Rossini of painting. The melodies of the 'Stabat Mater'--_Fac ut

portem_ or _Quis est homo_--are the exact analogues in music of

Correggio's voluptuous renderings of grave or mysterious motives. Nor,

again, did he possess that severe and lofty art of composition which

subordinates the fancy to the reason, and which seeks for the highest

intellectual beauty in a kind of architectural harmony supreme above

the melodies of gracefulness in detail. The Florentines and those who

shared their spirit--Michelangelo and Lionardo and Raphael--deriving

this principle of design from the geometrical art of the Middle Ages,

converted it to the noblest uses in their vast well-ordered

compositions. But Correggio ignored the laws of scientific

construction. It was enough for him to produce a splendid and

brilliant effect by the life and movement of his figures, and by the

intoxicating beauty of his forms. His type of beauty, too, is by no

means elevated. Lionardo painted souls whereof the features and the

limbs are but an index. The charm of Michelangelo's ideal is like a

flower upon a tree of rugged strength. Raphael aims at the loveliness

which cannot be disjoined from goodness. But Correggio is contented

with bodies 'delicate and desirable.' His angels are genii

disimprisoned from the perfumed chalices of flowers, houris of an

erotic paradise, elemental spirits of nature wantoning in Eden in her

prime. To accuse the painter of conscious immorality or of what is

stigmatised as sensuality, would be as ridiculous as to class his

seraphic beings among the products of the Christian imagination. They

belong to the generation of the fauns; like fauns, they combine a

certain savage wildness, a dithyrambic ecstasy of inspiration, a

delight in rapid movement as they revel amid clouds or flowers, with

the permanent and all-pervading sweetness of the master's style. When

infantine or childlike, these celestial sylphs are scarcely to be

distinguished for any noble quality of beauty from Murillo's cherubs,

and are far less divine than the choir of children who attend Madonna

in Titian's 'Assumption.' But in their boyhood and their prime of

youth, they acquire a fulness of sensuous vitality and a radiance that

are peculiar to Correggio. The lily-bearer who helps to support S.

Thomas beneath the dome of the cathedral at Parma, the groups of

seraphs who crowd behind the Incoronata of S. Giovanni, and the two

wild-eyed open-mouthed S. Johns stationed at each side of the

celestial throne, are among the most splendid instances of the

adolescent loveliness conceived by Correggio. Where the painter found

their models may be questioned but not answered; for he has made them

of a different fashion from the race of mortals: no court of Roman

emperor or Turkish sultan, though stocked with the flowers of

Bithynian and Circassian youth, have seen their like. Mozart's

Cherubino seems to have sat for all of them. At any rate they

incarnate the very spirit of the songs he sings.

As a consequence of this predilection for sensuous and voluptuous

forms, Correggio had no power of imagining grandly or severely.

Satisfied with material realism in his treatment even of sublime

mysteries, he converts the hosts of heaven into a 'fricassee of

frogs,' according to the old epigram. His apostles, gazing after the

Virgin who has left the earth, are thrown into attitudes so violent

and so dramatically foreshortened, that seen from below upon the

pavement of the cathedral, little of their form is distinguishable

except legs and arms in vehement commotion. Very different is Titian's

conception of this scene. To express the spiritual meaning, the

emotion of Madonna's transit, with all the pomp which colour and

splendid composition can convey, is Titian's sole care; whereas

Correggio appears to have been satisfied with realising the tumult of

heaven rushing to meet earth, and earth straining upwards to ascend to

heaven in violent commotion--a very orgasm of frenetic rapture. The

essence of the event is forgotten: its external manifestation alone is

presented to the eye; and only the accessories of beardless angels and

cloud-encumbered cherubs are really beautiful amid a surge of limbs in

restless movement. More dignified, because designed with more repose,

is the Apocalypse of S. John painted upon the cupola of S. Giovanni.

The apostles throned on clouds, with which the dome is filled, gaze

upward to one point. Their attitudes are noble; their form is heroic;

in their eyes there is the strange ecstatic look by which Correggio

interpreted his sense of supernatural vision: it is a gaze not of

contemplation or deep thought, but of wild half-savage joy, as if

these saints also had become the elemental genii of cloud and air,

spirits emergent from ether, the salamanders of an empyrean

intolerable to mortal sense. The point on which their eyes converge,

the culmination of their vision, is the figure of Christ. Here all the

weakness of Correggio's method is revealed. He had undertaken to

realise by no ideal allegorical suggestion, by no symbolism of

architectural grouping, but by actual prosaic measurement, by

corporeal form in subjection to the laws of perspective and

foreshortening, things which in their very essence admit of only a

figurative revelation. Therefore his Christ, the centre of all those

earnest eyes, is contracted to a shape in which humanity itself is

mean, a sprawling figure which irresistibly reminds one of a frog. The

clouds on which the saints repose are opaque and solid; cherubs in

countless multitudes, a swarm of merry children, crawl about upon

these feather-beds of vapour, creep between the legs of the apostles,

and play at bopeep behind their shoulders. There is no propriety in

their appearance there. They take no interest in the beatific vision.

They play no part in the celestial symphony; nor are they capable of

more than merely infantine enjoyment. Correggio has sprinkled them

lavishly like living flowers about his cloudland, because he could not

sustain a grave and solemn strain of music, but was forced by his

temperament to overlay the melody with roulades. Gazing at these

frescoes, the thought came to me that Correggio was like a man

listening to sweetest flute-playing, and translating phrase after

phrase as they passed through his fancy into laughing faces, breezy

tresses, and rolling mists. Sometimes a grander cadence reached his

ear; and then S. Peter with the keys, or S. Augustine of the mighty

brow, or the inspired eyes of S. John, took form beneath his pencil.

But the light airs returned, and rose and lily faces bloomed again for

him among the clouds. It is not therefore in dignity or sublimity that

Correggio excels, but in artless grace and melodious tenderness. The

Madonna della Scala clasping her baby with a caress which the little

child returns, S. Catherine leaning in a rapture of ecstatic love to

wed the infant Christ, S. Sebastian in the bloom of almost boyish

beauty, are the so-called sacred subjects to which the painter was

adequate, and which he has treated with the voluptuous tenderness we

find in his pictures of Leda and Danae and Io. Could these saints and

martyrs descend from Correggio's canvas, and take flesh, and breathe,

and begin to live; of what high action, of what grave passion, of what

exemplary conduct in any walk of life would they be capable? That is

the question which they irresistibly suggest; and we are forced to

answer, None! The moral and religious world did not exist for

Correggio. His art was but a way of seeing carnal beauty in a dream

that had no true relation to reality.

Correggio's sensibility to light and colour was exactly on a par with

his feeling for form. He belongs to the poets of chiaroscuro and the

poets of colouring; but in both regions he maintains the individuality

so strongly expressed in his choice of purely sensuous beauty.

Tintoretto makes use of light and shade for investing his great

compositions with dramatic intensity. Rembrandt interprets sombre and

fantastic moods of the mind by golden gloom and silvery irradiation,

translating thought into the language of penumbral mystery. Lionardo

studies the laws of light scientifically, so that the proper roundness

and effect of distance should be accurately rendered, and all the

subtleties of nature's smiles be mimicked. Correggio is content with

fixing on his canvas the [Greek: anêrithmon gelasma], the

many-twinkling laughter of light in motion, rained down through fleecy

clouds or trembling foliage, melting into half-shadows, bathing and

illuminating every object with a soft caress. There are no tragic

contrasts of splendour sharply defined on blackness, no mysteries of

half-felt and pervasive twilight, no studied accuracies of noonday

clearness in his work. Light and shadow are woven together on his

figures like an impalpable Coan gauze, aërial and transparent,

enhancing the palpitations of voluptuous movement which he loved. His

colouring, in like manner, has none of the superb and mundane pomp

which the Venetians affected; it does not glow or burn or beat the

fire of gems into our brain; joyous and wanton, it seems to be exactly

such a beauty-bloom as sense requires for its satiety. There is

nothing in his hues to provoke deep passion or to stimulate the

yearnings of the soul: the pure blushes of the dawn and the crimson

pyres of sunset are nowhere in the world that he has painted. But that

chord of jocund colour which may fitly be married to the smiles of

light, the blues which are found in laughing eyes, the pinks that

tinge the cheeks of early youth, and the warm yet silvery tones of

healthy flesh, mingle as in a marvellous pearl-shell on his pictures.

Both chiaroscuro and colouring have this supreme purpose in art, to

effect the sense like music, and like music to create a mood in the

soul of the spectator. Now the mood which Correggio stimulates is one

of natural and thoughtless pleasure. To feel his influence, and at the

same moment to be the subject of strong passion, or fierce lust, or

heroic resolve, or profound contemplation, or pensive melancholy, is

impossible. Wantonness, innocent because unconscious of sin, immoral

because incapable of any serious purpose, is the quality which

prevails in all that he has painted. The pantomimes of a Mohammedan

paradise might be put upon the stage after patterns supplied by this

least spiritual of painters.

It follows from this analysis that the Correggiosity of Correggio,

that which sharply distinguished him from all previous artists, was

the faculty of painting a purely voluptuous dream of beautiful beings

in perpetual movement, beneath the laughter of morning light, in a

world of never-failing April hues. When he attempts to depart from the

fairyland of which he was the Prospero, and to match himself with the

masters of sublime thought or earnest passion, he proves his weakness.

But within his own magic circle he reigns supreme, no other artist

having blended the witcheries of colouring, chiaroscuro,and faunlike

loveliness of form into a harmony so perfect in its sensuous charm.

Bewitched by the strains of the siren, we pardon affectations of

expression, emptiness of meaning, feebleness of composition,

exaggerated and melodramatic attitudes. There is what Goethe called a

demonic influence in the art of Correggio: 'In poetry,' said Goethe to

Eckermann, 'especially in that which is unconscious, before which

reason and understanding fall short, and which therefore produces

effects so far surpassing all conception, there is always something

demonic.' It is not to be wondered that Correggio, possessed of this

demonic power in the highest degree, and working to a purely sensuous

end, should have exercised a fatal influence over art. His successors,

attracted by an intoxicating loveliness which they could not analyse,

which had nothing in common with the reason or the understanding, but

was like a glamour cast upon the soul in its most secret

sensibilities, threw themselves blindly into the imitation of

Correggio's faults. His affectation, his want of earnest thought, his

neglect of composition, his sensuous realism, his all-pervading

sweetness, his infantine prettiness, his substitution of

thaumaturgical effects for conscientious labour, admitted only too

easy imitation, and were but too congenial with the spirit of the late

Renaissance. Cupolas through the length and breadth of Italy began to

be covered with clouds and simpering cherubs in the convulsions of

artificial ecstasy. The attenuated elegance of Parmigiano, the

attitudinising of Anselmi's saints and angels, and a general sacrifice

of what is solid and enduring to sentimental gewgaws on the part of

all painters who had submitted to the magic of Correggio, proved how

easy it was to go astray with the great master. Meanwhile no one could

approach him in that which was truly his own--the delineation of a

transient moment in the life of sensuous beauty, the painting of a

smile on Nature's face, when light and colour tremble in harmony with

the movement of joyous living creatures. Another demonic nature of a

far more powerful type contributed his share to the ruin of art in

Italy. Michelangelo's constrained attitudes and muscular anatomy were

imitated by painters and sculptors, who thought that the grand style

lay in the presentation of theatrical athletes, but who could not

seize the secret whereby the great master made even the bodies of men

and women--colossal trunks and writhen limbs--interpret the meanings

of his deep and melancholy soul.

It is a sad law of progress in art, that when the æsthetic impulse is

on the wane, artists should perforce select to follow the weakness

rather than the vigour, of their predecessors. While painting was in

the ascendant, Raphael could take the best of Perugino and discard the

worst; in its decadence Parmigiano reproduces the affectations of

Correggio, and Bernini carries the exaggerations of Michelangelo to

absurdity. All arts describe a parabola. The force which produces

them causes them to rise throughout their growth up to a certain

point, and then to descend more gradually in a long and slanting line

of regular declension. There is no real break of continuity. The end

is the result of simple exhaustion. Thus the last of our Elizabethan

dramatists, Shirley and Crowne and Killigrew, pushed to its ultimate

conclusion the principle inherent in Marlowe, not attempting to break

new ground, nor imitating the excellences so much as the defects of

their forerunners. Thus too the Pointed style of architecture in

England gave birth first to what is called the Decorated, next to the

Perpendicular, and finally expired in the Tudor. Each step was a step

of progress--at first for the better--at last for the worse--but

logical, continuous, necessitated.[11]

It is difficult to leave Correggio without at least posing the

question of the difference between moralised and merely sensual art.

Is all art excellent in itself and good in its effect that is

beautiful and earnest? There is no doubt that Correggio's work is in a

way most beautiful; and it bears unmistakable signs of the master

having given himself with single-hearted devotion to the expression of

that phase of loveliness which he could apprehend. In so far we must

admit that his art is both excellent and solid. Yet we are unable to

conceive that any human being could be made better--stronger for

endurance, more fitted for the uses of the world, more sensitive to

what is noble in nature--by its contemplation. At the best Correggio

does but please us in our lighter moments, and we are apt to feel that

the pleasure he has given is of an enervating kind. To expect obvious

morality of any artist is confessedly absurd. It is not the artist's

province to preach, or even to teach, except by remote suggestion. Yet

the mind of the artist may be highly moralised, and then he takes rank

not merely with the ministers to refined pleasure, but also with the

educators of the world. He may, for example, be penetrated with a just

sense of humanity like Shakspere, or with a sublime temperance like

Sophocles, instinct with prophetic intuition like Michelangelo, or

with passionate experience like Beethoven. The mere sight of the work

of Pheidias is like breathing pure health-giving air. Milton and Dante

were steeped in religious patriotism; Goethe was pervaded with

philosophy, and Balzac with scientific curiosity. Ariosto, Cervantes,

and even Boccaccio are masters in the mysteries of common life. In all

these cases the tone of the artist's mind is felt throughout his work:

what he paints, or sings, or writes, conveys a lesson while it

pleases. On the other hand, depravity in an artist or a poet

percolates through work which has in it nothing positive of evil, and

a very miasma of poisonous influence may rise from the apparently

innocuous creations of a tainted soul. Now Correggio is moralised in

neither way--neither as a good nor as a bad man, neither as an acute

thinker nor as a deliberate voluptuary. He is simply sensuous. On his

own ground he is even very fresh and healthy: his delineation of

youthful maternity, for example, is as true as it is beautiful; and

his sympathy with the gleefulness of children is devoid of

affectation. We have then only to ask ourselves whether the defect in

him of all thought and feeling which is not at once capable of

graceful fleshly incarnation, be sufficient to lower him in the scale

of artists. This question must of course be answered according to our

definition of the purposes of art. There is no doubt that the most

highly organised art--that which absorbs the most numerous human

qualities and effects a harmony between the most complex elements--is

the noblest. Therefore the artist who combines moral elevation and

power of thought with a due appreciation of sensual beauty, is more

elevated and more beneficial than one whose domain is simply that of

carnal loveliness. Correggio, if this be so, must take a comparatively

low rank. Just as we welcome the beautiful athlete for the radiant

life that is in him, but bow before the personality of Sophocles,

whose perfect form enshrined a noble and highly educated soul, so we

gratefully accept Correggio for his grace, while we approach the

consummate art of Michelangelo with reverent awe. It is necessary in

æsthetics as elsewhere to recognise a hierarchy of excellence, the

grades of which are determined by the greater or less

comprehensiveness of the artist's nature expressed in his work. At the

same time, the calibre of the artist's genius must be estimated; for

eminent greatness even of a narrow kind will always command our

admiration: and the amount of his originality has also to be taken

into account. What is unique has, for that reason alone, a claim on

our consideration. Judged in this way, Correggio deserves a place,

say, in the sweet planet Venus, above the moon and above Mercury,

among the artists who have not advanced beyond the contemplations

which find their proper outcome in love. Yet, even thus, he aids the

culture of humanity. 'We should take care,' said Goethe, apropos of

Byron, to Eckermann, 'not to be always looking for culture in the

decidedly pure and moral. Everything that is great promotes

cultivation as soon as we are aware of it.'

* * * * *

_CANOSSA_

Italy is less the land of what is venerable in antiquity, than of

beauty, by divine right young eternally in spite of age. This is due

partly to her history and art and literature, partly to the temper of

the races who have made her what she is, and partly to her natural

advantages. Her oldest architectural remains, the temples of Paestum

and Girgenti, or the gates of Perugia and Volterra, are so adapted to

Italian landscape and so graceful in their massive strength, that we

forget the centuries which have passed over them. We leap as by a

single bound from the times of Roman greatness to the new birth of

humanity in the fourteenth century, forgetting the many years during

which Italy, like the rest of Europe, was buried in what our ancestors

called Gothic barbarism. The illumination cast upon the classic period

by the literature of Rome and by the memory of her great men is so

vivid, that we feel the days of the Republic and the Empire to be near

us; while the Italian Renaissance is so truly a revival of that former

splendour, a resumption of the music interrupted for a season, that it

is extremely difficult to form any conception of the five long

centuries which elapsed between the Lombard invasion in 568 and the

accession of Hildebrand to the Pontificate in 1073. So true is it that

nothing lives and has reality for us but what is spiritual,

intellectual, self-possessed in personality and consciousness. When

the Egyptian priest said to Solon, 'You Greeks are always children,'

he intended a gentle sarcasm, but he implied a compliment; for the

quality of imperishable youth belonged to the Hellenic spirit, and has

become the heritage of every race which partook of it. And this spirit

in no common degree has been shared by the Italians of the earlier and

the later classic epoch. The land is full of monuments pertaining to

those two brilliant periods; and whenever the voice of poet has spoken

or the hand of artist has been at work, that spirit, as distinguished

from the spirit of mediaevalism, has found expression.

Yet it must be remembered that during the five centuries above

mentioned Italy was given over to Lombards, Franks, and Germans.

Feudal institutions, alien to the social and political ideals of the

classic world, took a tolerably firm hold on the country. The Latin

element remained silent, passive, in abeyance, undergoing an important

transformation. It was in the course of those five hundred years that

the Italians as a modern people, separable from their Roman ancestors,

were formed. At the close of this obscure passage in Italian history,

their communes, the foundation of Italy's future independence, and the

source of her peculiar national development, appeared in all the

vigour and audacity of youth. At its close the Italian genius

presented Europe with its greatest triumph of constructive ability,

the Papacy. At its close again the series of supreme artistic

achievements, starting with the architecture of churches and public

palaces, passing on to sculpture and painting, and culminating in

music, which only ended with the temporary extinction of national

vitality in the seventeenth century, was simultaneously begun in all

the provinces of the peninsula.

So important were these five centuries of incubation for Italy, and so

little is there left of them to arrest the attention of the student,

dazzled as he is by the ever-living glories of Greece, Rome, and the

Renaissance, that a visit to the ruins of Canossa is almost a duty.

There, in spite of himself, by the very isolation and forlorn

abandonment of what was once so formidable a seat of feudal despotism

and ecclesiastical tyranny, he is forced to confront the obscure but

mighty spirit of the middle ages. There, if anywhere, the men of those

iron-hearted times anterior to the Crusades will acquire distinctness

for his imagination, when he recalls the three main actors in the

drama enacted on the summit of Canossa's rock in the bitter winter of

1077.

Canossa lies almost due south of Reggio d'Emilia, upon the slopes of

the Apennines. Starting from Reggio, the carriage-road keeps to the

plain for some while in a westerly direction, and then bends away

towards the mountains. As we approach their spurs, the ground begins

to rise. The rich Lombard tilth of maize and vine gives place to

English-looking hedgerows, lined with oaks, and studded with handsome

dark tufts of green hellebore. The hills descend in melancholy

earth-heaps on the plain, crowned here and there with ruined castles.

Four of these mediaeval strongholds, called Bianello, Montevetro,

Monteluzzo, and Montezano, give the name of Quattro Castelli to the

commune. The most important of them, Bianello, which, next to Canossa,

was the strongest fortress possessed by the Countess Matilda and her

ancestors, still presents a considerable mass of masonry, roofed and

habitable. The group formed a kind of advance-guard for Canossa

against attack from Lombardy. After passing Quattro Castelli we enter

the hills, climbing gently upwards between barren slopes of ashy grey

earth--the _débris_ of most ancient Apennines--crested at favourable

points with lonely towers. In truth the whole country bristles with

ruined forts, making it clear that during the middle ages Canossa was

but the centre of a great military system, the core and kernel of a

fortified position which covered an area to be measured by scores of

square miles, reaching far into the mountains, and buttressed on the

plain. As yet, however, after nearly two hours' driving, Canossa has

not come in sight. At last a turn in the road discloses an opening in

the valley of the Enza to the left: up this lateral gorge we see first

the Castle of Rossena on its knoll of solid red rock, flaming in the

sunlight; and then, further withdrawn, detached from all surrounding

objects, and reared aloft as though to sweep the sea of waved and

broken hills around it, a sharp horn of hard white stone. That is

Canossa--the _alba Canossa_, the _candida petra_ of its rhyming

chronicler. There is no mistaking the commanding value of its

situation. At the same time the brilliant whiteness of Canossa's

rocky hill, contrasted with the red gleam of Rossena, and outlined

against the prevailing dulness of these earthy Apennines, secures a

picturesque individuality concordant with its unique history and

unrivalled strength.

There is still a journey of two hours before the castle can be

reached: and this may be performed on foot or horseback. The path

winds upward over broken ground; following the _arête_ of curiously

jumbled and thwarted hill-slopes; passing beneath the battlements of

Rossena, whence the unfortunate Everelina threw herself in order to

escape the savage love of her lord and jailor; and then skirting those

horrid earthen _balze_ which are so common and so unattractive a

feature of Apennine scenery. The most hideous _balze_ to be found in

the length and breadth of Italy are probably those of Volterra, from

which the citizens themselves recoil with a kind of terror, and which

lure melancholy men by intolerable fascination on to suicide. For ever

crumbling, altering with frost and rain, discharging gloomy glaciers

of slow-crawling mud, and scarring the hillside with tracts of

barrenness, these earth-precipices are among the most ruinous and

discomfortable failures of nature. They have not even so much of

wildness or grandeur as forms, the saving merit of nearly all wasteful

things in the world, and can only be classed with the desolate

_ghiare_ of Italian river-beds.

Such as they are, these _balze_ form an appropriate preface to the

gloomy and repellent isolation of Canossa. The rock towers from a

narrow platform to the height of rather more than 160 feet from its

base. The top is fairly level, forming an irregular triangle, of which

the greatest length is about 260 feet, and the width about 100 feet.

Scarcely a vestige of any building can be traced either upon the

platform or the summit, with the exception of a broken wall and

windows supposed to belong to the end of the sixteenth century. The

ancient castle, with its triple circuit of walls, enclosing barracks

for the garrison, lodgings for the lord and his retainers, a stately

church, a sumptuous monastery, storehouses, stables, workshops, and

all the various buildings of a fortified stronghold, have utterly

disappeared. The very passage of approach cannot be ascertained; for

it is doubtful whether the present irregular path that scales the

western face of the rock be really the remains of some old staircase,

corresponding to that by which Mont S. Michel in Normandy is ascended.

One thing is tolerably certain--that the three walls of which we hear

so much from the chroniclers, and which played so picturesque a part

in the drama of Henry IV.'s penance, surrounded the cliff at its base,

and embraced a large acreage of ground. The citadel itself must have

been but the acropolis or keep of an extensive fortress.

There has been plenty of time since the year 1255, when the people of

Reggio sacked and destroyed Canossa, for Nature to resume her

undisputed sway by obliterating the handiwork of men; and at present

Nature forms the chief charm of Canossa. Lying one afternoon of May on

the crisp short grass at the edge of a precipice purple with iris in

full blossom, I surveyed, from what were once the battlements of

Matilda's castle, a prospect than which there is none more

spirit-stirring by reason of its beauty and its manifold associations

in Europe. The lower castle-crowded hills have sunk. Reggio lies at

our feet, shut in between the crests of Monte Carboniano and Monte

delle Celle. Beyond Reggio stretches Lombardy--the fairest and most

memorable battlefield of nations, the richest and most highly

cultivated garden of civilised industry. Nearly all the Lombard cities

may be seen, some of them faint like bluish films of vapour, some

clear with dome and spire. There is Modena and her Ghirlandina. Carpi,

Parma, Mirandola, Verona, Mantua, lie well defined and russet on the

flat green map; and there flashes a bend of lordly Po; and there the

Euganeans rise like islands, telling us where Padua and Ferrara nestle

in the amethystine haze Beyond and above all to the northward sweep

the Alps, tossing their silvery crests up into the cloudless sky from

the violet mist that girds their flanks and drowns their basements.

Monte Adamello and the Ortler, the cleft of the Brenner, and the sharp

peaks of the Venetian Alps are all distinctly visible. An eagle flying

straight from our eyrie might traverse Lombardy and light among the

snow-fields of the Valtelline between sunrise and sundown. Nor is the

prospect tame to southward. Here the Apennines roll, billow above

billow, in majestic desolation, soaring to snow summits in the

Pellegrino region. As our eye attempts to thread that labyrinth of

hill and vale, we tell ourselves that those roads wind to Tuscany, and

yonder stretches Garfagnana, where Ariosto lived and mused in

honourable exile from the world he loved.

It was by one of the mountain passes that lead from Lucca northward

that the first founder of Canossa is said to have travelled early in

the tenth century. Sigifredo, if the tradition may be trusted, was

very wealthy; and with his money he bought lands and signorial rights

at Reggio, bequeathing to his children, when he died about 945, a

patrimony which they developed into a petty kingdom. Azzo, his second

son, fortified Canossa, and made it his principal place of residence.

When Lothair, King of Italy, died in 950, leaving his beautiful widow

to the ill-treatment of his successor, Berenger, Adelaide found a

protector in this Azzo. She had been imprisoned on the Lake of Garda;

but managing to escape in man's clothes to Mantua, she thence sent

news of her misfortunes to Canossa. Azzo lost no time in riding with

his knights to her relief, and brought her back in safety to his

mountain fastness. It is related that Azzo was afterwards instrumental

in calling Otho into Italy and procuring his marriage with Adelaide,

in consequence of which events Italy became a fief of the Empire.

Owing to the part he played at this time, the Lord of Canossa was

recognised as one of the most powerful vassals of the German Emperor

in Lombardy. Honours were heaped upon him; and he grew so rich and

formidable that Berenger, the titular King of Italy, laid siege to his

fortress of Canossa. The memory of this siege, which lasted for three

years and a half, is said still to linger in the popular traditions of

the place. When Azzo died at the end of the tenth century, he left to

his son Tedaldo the title of Count of Reggio and Modena; and this

title was soon after raised to that of Marquis. The Marches governed

as Vicar of the Empire by Tedaldo included Reggio, Modena, Ferrara,

Brescia, and probably Mantua. They stretched, in fact, across the

north of Italy, forming a quadrilateral between the Alps and

Apennines. Like his father, Tedaldo adhered consistently to the

Imperial party; and when he died and was buried at Canossa, he in his

turn bequeathed to his son Bonifazio a power and jurisdiction

increased by his own abilities. Bonifazio held the state of a

sovereign at Canossa, adding the duchy of Tuscany to his father's

fiefs, and meeting the allied forces of the Lombard barons in the

field of Coviolo like an independent potentate. His power and

splendour were great enough to rouse the jealousy of the Emperor; but

Henry III. seems to have thought it more prudent to propitiate this

proud vassal, and to secure his kindness, than to attempt his

humiliation. Bonifazio married Beatrice, daughter of Frederick, Duke

of Lorraine--her whose marble sarcophagus in the Campo Santo at Pisa

is said to have inspired Niccola Pisano with his new style of

sculpture. Their only child, Matilda, was born, probably at Lucca, in

1046; and six years after her birth, Bonifazio, who had swayed his

subjects like an iron-handed tyrant, was murdered. To the great House

of Canossa, the rulers of one-third of Italy, there now remained only

two women, Bonifazio's widow Beatrice, and his daughter Matilda.

Beatrice married Godfrey, Duke of Lorraine, who was recognised by

Henry IV. as her husband and as feudatory of the Empire in the full

place of Boniface. He died about 1070; and in this year Matilda was

married by proxy to his son, Godfrey the Hunchback, whom, however,

she did not see till the year 1072. The marriage was not a happy one;

and the question has even been disputed among Matilda's biographers

whether it was ever consummated. At any rate it did not last long; for

Godfrey was killed at Antwerp in 1076. In this year Matilda also lost

her mother, Beatrice, who died at Pisa, and was buried in the

cathedral.

By this rapid enumeration of events it will be seen how the power and

honours of the House of Canossa, including Tuscany, Spoleto, and the

fairest portions of Lombardy, had devolved upon a single woman of the

age of thirty at the moment when the fierce quarrel between Pope and

Emperor began in the year 1076. Matilda was destined to play a great,

a striking, and a tragic part in the opening drama of Italian history.

Her decided character and uncompromising course of action have won for

her the name of 'la gran donna d'Italia,' and have caused her memory

to be blessed or execrated, according as the temporal pretensions and

spiritual tyranny of the Papacy may have found supporters or opponents

in posterity. She was reared from childhood in habits of austerity and

unquestioning piety. Submission to the Church became for her not

merely a rule of conduct, but a passionate enthusiasm. She identified

herself with the cause of four successive Popes, protected her idol,

the terrible and iron-hearted Hildebrand, in the time of his

adversity; remained faithful to his principles after his death; and

having served the Holy See with all her force and all that she

possessed through all her lifetime, she bequeathed her vast dominions

to it on her deathbed. Like some of the greatest mediaeval

characters--like Hildebrand himself--Matilda was so thoroughly of one

piece, that she towers above the mists of ages with the massive

grandeur of an incarnated idea. She is for us the living statue of a

single thought, an undivided impulse, the more than woman born to

represent her age. Nor was it without reason that Dante symbolised in

her the love of Holy Church; though students of the 'Purgatory' will

hardly recognise the lovely maiden, singing and plucking flowers

beside the stream of Lethe, in the stern and warlike chatelaine of

Canossa. Unfortunately we know but little of Matilda's personal

appearance. Her health was not strong; and it is said to have been

weakened, especially in her last illness, by ascetic observances. Yet

she headed her own troops, armed with sword and cuirass, avoiding

neither peril nor fatigue in the quarrels of her master Gregory. Up to

the year 1622 two strong suits of mail were preserved at Quattro

Castelli, which were said to have been worn by her in battle, and

which were afterwards sold on the market-place at Reggio. This habit

of donning armour does not, however, prove that Matilda was

exceptionally vigorous; for in those savage times she could hardly

have played the part of heroine without participating personally in

the dangers of warfare.

No less monumental in the plastic unity of his character was the monk

Hildebrand, who for twenty years before his elevation to the Papacy

had been the maker of Popes and the creator of the policy of Rome.

When he was himself elected in the year 1073, and had assumed the name

of Gregory VII., he immediately began to put in practice the plans for

Church aggrandisement he had slowly matured during the previous

quarter of a century. To free the Church from its subservience to the

Empire, to assert the Pope's right to ratify the election of the

Emperor and to exercise the right of jurisdiction over him, to place

ecclesiastical appointments in the sole power of the Roman See, and to

render the celibacy of the clergy obligatory, were the points he had

resolved to carry. Taken singly and together, these chief aims of

Hildebrand's policy had but one object--the magnification of the

Church at the expense both of the people and of secular authorities,

and the further separation of the Church from the ties and sympathies

of common life that bound it to humanity. To accuse Hildebrand of

personal ambition would be but shallow criticism, though it is clear

that his inflexible and puissant nature found a savage selfish

pleasure in trampling upon power and humbling pride at warfare with

his own. Yet his was in no sense an egotistic purpose like that which

moved the Popes of the Renaissance to dismember Italy for their

bastards. Hildebrand, like Matilda, was himself the creature of a

great idea. These two potent personalities completely understood each

other, and worked towards a single end. Tho mythopoeic fancy might

conceive of them as the male and female manifestations of one dominant

faculty, the spirit of ecclesiastical dominion incarnate in a man and

woman of almost super-human mould.

Opposed to them, as the third actor in the drama of Canossa, was a man

of feebler mould. Henry IV., King of Italy, but not yet crowned

Emperor, had none of his opponents' unity of purpose or monumental

dignity of character. At war with his German feudatories, browbeaten

by rebellious sons, unfaithful and cruel to his wife, vacillating in

the measures he adopted to meet his divers difficulties, at one time

tormented by his conscience into cowardly submission, and at another

treasonably neglectful of the most solemn obligations, Henry was no

match for the stern wills against which he was destined to break in

unavailing passion. Early disagreements with Gregory had culminated in

his excommunication. The German nobles abandoned his cause; and Henry

found it expedient to summon a council in Augsburg for the settlement

of matters in dispute between the Empire and the Papacy. Gregory

expressed his willingness to attend this council, and set forth from

Rome accompanied by the Countess Matilda in December 1076. He did not,

however, travel further than Vercelli, for news here reached him that

Henry was about to enter Italy at the head of a powerful army. Matilda

hereupon persuaded the Holy Father to place himself in safety among

her strongholds of Canossa. Thither accordingly Gregory retired before

the ending of that year; and bitter were the sarcasms uttered by the

imperial partisans in Italy upon this protection offered by a fair

countess to the monk who had been made a Pope. The foul calumnies of

that bygone age would be unworthy of even so much as this notice, if

we did not trace in them the ineradicable Italian tendency to cynical

insinuation--a tendency which has involved the history of the

Renaissance Popes in an almost impenetrable mist of lies and

exaggerations. Henry was in truth upon his road to Italy, but with a

very different attendance from that which Gregory expected.

Accompanied by Bertha, his wife, and his boy son Conrad, the Emperor

elect left Spires in the condition of a fugitive, crossed Burgundy,

spent Christmas at Besançon, and journeyed to the foot of Mont Cenis.

It is said that he was followed by a single male servant of mean

birth; and if the tale of his adventures during the passage of the

Alps can be credited, history presents fewer spectacles more

picturesque than the straits to which this representative of the

Cæsars, this supreme chief of feudal civility, this ruler destined

still to be the leader of mighty armies and the father of a line of

monarchs, was exposed. Concealing his real name and state, he induced

some shepherds to lead him and his escort through the thick snows to

the summit of Mont Cenis; and by the help of these men the imperial

party were afterwards let down the snow-slopes on the further side by

means of ropes. Bertha and her women were sewn up in hides and dragged

across the frozen surface of the winter drifts. It was a year

memorable for its severity. Heavy snow had fallen in October, which

continued ice-bound and unyielding till the following April.

No sooner had Henry reached Turin, than he set forward again in the

direction of Canossa. The fame of his arrival had preceded him, and

he found that his party was far stronger in Italy than he had ventured

to expect. Proximity to the Church of Rome divests its fulminations of

half their terrors. The Italian bishops and barons, less superstitious

than the Germans, and with greater reason to resent the domineering

graspingness of Gregory, were ready to espouse the Emperor's cause.

Henry gathered a formidable force as he marched onward across

Lombardy; and some of the most illustrious prelates and nobles of the

South were in his suite. A more determined leader than Henry proved

himself to be, might possibly have forced Gregory to some

accommodation, in spite of the strength of Canossa and the Pope's

invincible obstinacy, by proper use of these supporters. Meanwhile the

adherents of the Church were mustered in Matilda's fortress; among

whom may be mentioned Azzo, the progenitor of Este and Brunswick;

Hugh, Abbot of Clugny; and the princely family of Piedmont. 'I am

become a second Rome,' exclaims Canossa, in the language of Matilda's

rhyming chronicler; 'all honours are mine; I hold at once both Pope

and King, the princes of Italy and those of Gaul, those of Rome, and

those from far beyond the Alps.' The stage was ready; the audience had

assembled; and now the three great actors were about to meet.

Immediately upon his arrival at Canossa, Henry sent for his cousin,

the Countess Matilda, and besought her to intercede for him with

Gregory. He was prepared to make any concessions or to undergo any

humiliations, if only the ban of excommunication might be removed;

nor, cowed as he was by his own superstitious conscience, and by the

memory of the opposition he had met with from his German vassals, does

he seem to have once thought of meeting force with force, and of

returning to his northern kingdom triumphant in the overthrow of

Gregory's pride. Matilda undertook to plead his cause before the

Pontiff. But Gregory was not to be moved so soon to mercy. 'If Henry

has in truth repented,' he replied, 'let him lay down crown and

sceptre, and declare himself unworthy of the name of king.' The only

point conceded to the suppliant was that he should be admitted in the

garb of a penitent within the precincts of the castle. Leaving his

retinue outside the walls, Henry entered the first series of outworks,

and was thence conducted to the second, so that between him and the

citadel itself there still remained the third of the surrounding

bastions. Here he was bidden to wait the Pope's pleasure; and here, in

the midst of that bitter winter weather, while the fierce winds of the

Apennines were sweeping sleet upon him in their passage from Monte

Pellegrino to the plain, he knelt barefoot, clothed in sackcloth,

fasting from dawn till eve, for three whole days. On the morning of

the fourth day, judging that Gregory was inexorable, and that his suit

would not be granted, Henry retired to the Chapel of S. Nicholas,

which stood within this second precinct. There he called to his aid

the Abbot of Clugny and the Countess, both of whom were his relations,

and who, much as they might sympathise with Gregory, could hardly be

supposed to look with satisfaction on their royal kinsman's outrage.

The Abbot told Henry that nothing in the world could move the Pope;

but Matilda, when in turn he fell before her knees and wept, engaged

to do for him the utmost. She probably knew that the moment for

unbending had arrived, and that her imperious guest could not with

either decency or prudence prolong the outrage offered to the civil

chief of Christendom. It was the 25th of January when the Emperor

elect was brought, half dead with cold and misery, into the Pope's

presence. There he prostrated himself in the dust, crying aloud for

pardon. It is said that Gregory first placed his foot upon Henry's

neck, uttering these words of Scripture: 'Super aspidem et basiliscum

ambulabis, et conculcabis leonem et draconem,' and that then he raised

him from the earth and formally pronounced his pardon. The prelates

and nobles who took part in this scene were compelled to guarantee

with their own oaths the vows of obedience pronounced by Henry; so

that in the very act of reconciliation a new insult was offered to

him. After this Gregory said mass, and permitted Henry to communicate;

and at the close of the day a banquet was served, at which the King

sat down to meat with the Pope and the Countess.

It is probable that, while Henry's penance was performed in the castle

courts beneath the rock, his reception by the Pope, and all that

subsequently happened, took place in the citadel itself. But of this

we have no positive information. Indeed the silence of the chronicles

as to the topography of Canossa is peculiarly unfortunate for lovers

of the picturesque in historic detail, now that there is no

possibility of tracing the outlines of the ancient building. Had the

author of the 'Vita Mathildis' (Muratori, vol. v.) foreseen that his

beloved Canossa would one day be nothing but a mass of native rock, he

would undoubtedly have been more explicit on these points; and much

that is vague about an event only paralleled by our Henry II.'s

penance before Becket's shrine at Canterbury, might now be clear.

Very little remains to be told about Canossa. During the same year,

1077, Matilda made the celebrated donation of her fiefs to Holy

Church. This was accepted by Gregory in the name of S. Peter, and it

was confirmed by a second deed during the pontificate of Urban IV. in

1102. Though Matilda subsequently married Guelfo d'Este, son of the

Duke of Bavaria, she was speedily divorced from him; nor was there any

heir to a marriage ridiculous by reason of disparity of age, the

bridegroom being but eighteen, while the bride was forty-three in the

year of her second nuptials. During one of Henry's descents into

Italy, he made an unsuccessful attack upon Canossa, assailing it at

the head of a considerable force one October morning in 1092.

Matilda's biographer informs us that the mists of autumn veiled his

beloved fortress from the eyes of the beleaguerers. They had not even

the satisfaction of beholding the unvanquished citadel; and, what was

more, the banner of the Emperor was seized and dedicated as a trophy

in the Church of S. Apollonio. In the following year the Countess

opened her gates of Canossa to an illustrious fugitive, Adelaide, the

wife of her old foeman, Henry, who had escaped with difficulty from

the insults and the cruelty of her husband. After Henry's death, his

son, the Emperor Henry V., paid Matilda a visit in her castle of

Bianello, addressed her by the name of mother, and conferred upon her

the vice-regency of Liguria. At the age of sixty-nine she died, in

1115, at Bondeno de' Roncori, and was buried, not among her kinsmen at

Canossa, but in an abbey of S. Benedict near Mantua. With her expired

the main line of the noble house she represented; though Canossa, now

made a fief of the Empire in spite of Matilda's donation, was given to

a family which claimed descent from Bonifazio's brother Conrad--a

young man killed in the battle of Coviolo. This family, in its turn,

was extinguished in the year 1570; but a junior branch still exists at

Verona. It will be remembered that Michelangelo Buonarroti claimed

kinship with the Count of Canossa; and a letter from the Count is

extant acknowledging the validity of his pretension.

As far back as 1255 the people of Reggio destroyed the castle; nor did

the nobles of Canossa distinguish themselves in subsequent history

among those families who based their despotisms on the _débris_ of the

Imperial power in Lombardy. It seemed destined that Canossa and all

belonging to it should remain as a mere name and memory of the

outgrown middle ages. Estensi, Carraresi, Visconti, Bentivogli, and

Gonzaghi belong to a later period of Lombard history, and mark the

dawn of the Renaissance.

As I lay and mused that afternoon of May upon the short grass, cropped

by two grey goats, whom a little boy was tending, it occurred to me to

ask the woman who had served me as guide, whether any legend remained

in the country concerning the Countess Matilda. She had often,

probably, been asked this question by other travellers. Therefore she

was more than usually ready with an answer, which, as far as I could

understand her dialect, was this. Matilda was a great and potent

witch, whose summons the devil was bound to obey. One day she aspired,

alone of all her sex, to say mass; but when the moment came for

sacring the elements, a thunderbolt fell from the clear sky, and

reduced her to ashes.[12] That the most single-hearted handmaid of the

Holy Church, whose life was one long devotion to its ordinances,

should survive in this grotesque myth, might serve to point a satire

upon the vanity of earthly fame. The legend in its very extravagance

is a fanciful distortion of the truth.

* * * * *

_FORNOVO_

In the town of Parma there is one surpassingly strange relic of the

past. The palace of the Farnesi, like many a haunt of upstart tyranny

and beggared pride on these Italian plains, rises misshapen and

disconsolate above the stream that bears the city's name. The squalor

of this grey-brown edifice of formless brick, left naked like the

palace of the same Farnesi at Piacenza, has something even horrid in

it now that only vague memory survives of its former uses. The

princely _sprezzatura_ of its ancient occupants, careless of these

unfinished courts and unroofed galleries amid the splendour of their

purfled silks and the glitter of their torchlight pageantry, has

yielded to sullen cynicism--the cynicism of arrested ruin and

unreverend age. All that was satisfying to the senses and distracting

to the eyesight in their transitory pomp has passed away, leaving a

sinister and naked shell. Remembrance can but summon up the crimes,

the madness, the trivialities of those dead palace-builders. An

atmosphere of evil clings to the dilapidated walls, as though the

tainted spirit of the infamous Pier Luigi still possessed the spot, on

which his toadstool brood of princelings sprouted in the mud of their

misdeeds. Enclosed in this huge labyrinth of brickwork is the relic of

which I spoke. It is the once world-famous Teatro Farnese, raised in

the year 1618 by Ranunzio Farnese for the marriage of Odoardo Farnese

with Margaret of Austria. Giambattista Aleotti, a native of

pageant-loving Ferrara, traced the stately curves and noble orders of

the galleries, designed the columns that support the raftered roof,

marked out the orchestra, arranged the stage, and breathed into the

whole the spirit of Palladio's most heroic neo-Latin style. Vast,

built of wood, dishevelled, with broken statues and blurred coats of

arms, with its empty scene, its uncurling frescoes, its hangings all

in rags, its cobwebs of two centuries, its dust and mildew and

discoloured gold--this theatre, a sham in its best days, and now that

ugliest of things, a sham unmasked and naked to the light of day, is

yet sublime, because of its proportioned harmony, because of its grand

Roman manner. The sight and feeling of it fasten upon the mind and

abide in the memory like a nightmare,--like one of Piranesi's weirdest

and most passion-haunted etchings for the _Carceri_. Idling there at

noon in the twilight of the dust-bedarkened windows, we fill the tiers

of those high galleries with ladies, the space below with grooms and

pages; the stage is ablaze with torches, and an Italian Masque, such

as our Marlowe dreamed of, fills the scene. But it is impossible to

dower these fancies with even such life as in healthier, happier

ruins phantasy may lend to imagination's figments. This theatre is

like a maniac's skull, empty of all but unrealities and mockeries of

things that are. The ghosts we raise here could never have been living

men and women: _questi sciaurati non fur mai vivi._ So clinging is the

sense of instability that appertains to every fragment of that dry-rot

tyranny which seized by evil fortune in the sunset of her golden day

on Italy.

In this theatre I mused one morning after visiting Fornovo; and the

thoughts suggested by the battlefield found their proper atmosphere in

the dilapidated place. What, indeed, is the Teatro Farnese but a

symbol of those hollow principalities which the despot and the

stranger built in Italy after the fatal date of 1494, when national

enthusiasm and political energy were expiring in a blaze of art, and

when the Italians as a people had ceased to be; but when the phantom

of their former life, surviving in high works of beauty, was still

superb by reason of imperishable style! How much in Italy of the

Renaissance was, like this plank-built plastered theatre, a glorious

sham! The sham was seen through then; and now it stands unmasked: and

yet, strange to say, so perfect is its form that we respect the sham

and yield our spirits to the incantation of its music.

The battle of Fornovo, as modern battles go, was a paltry affair; and

even at the time it seemed sufficiently without result. Yet the

trumpets which rang on July 6, 1495, for the onset, sounded the

_réveil_ of the modern world; and in the inconclusive termination of

the struggle of that day, the Italians were already judged and

sentenced as a nation. The armies who met that morning represented

Italy and France,--Italy, the Sibyl of Renaissance; France, the Sibyl

of Revolution. At the fall of evening Europe was already looking

northward; and the last years of the fifteenth century were opening

an act which closed in blood at Paris on the ending of the eighteenth.

If it were not for thoughts like these, no one, I suppose, would take

the trouble to drive for two hours out of Parma to the little village

of Fornovo--a score of bare grey hovels on the margin of a pebbly

river-bed beneath the Apennines. The fields on either side, as far as

eye can see, are beautiful indeed in May sunlight, painted here with

flax, like shallow sheets of water reflecting a pale sky, and there

with clover red as blood. Scarce unfolded leaves sparkle like

flamelets of bright green upon the knotted vines, and the young corn

is bending all one way beneath a western breeze. But not less

beautiful than this is the whole broad plain of Lombardy; nor are the

nightingales louder here than in the acacia trees around Pavia. As we

drive, the fields become less fertile, and the hills encroach upon the

level, sending down their spurs upon that waveless plain like blunt

rocks jutting out into a tranquil sea. When we reach the bed of the

Taro, these hills begin to narrow on either hand, and the road rises.

Soon they open out again with gradual curving lines, forming a kind of

amphitheatre filled up from flank to flank with the _ghiara_ or pebbly

bottom of the Taro. The Taro is not less wasteful than any other of

the brotherhood of streams that pour from Alp or Apennine to swell the

Po. It wanders, an impatient rivulet, through a wilderness of

boulders, uncertain of its aim, shifting its course with the season of

the year, unless the jaws of some deep-cloven gully hold it tight and

show how insignificant it is. As we advance, the hills approach again;

between their skirts there is nothing but the river-bed; and now on

rising ground above the stream, at the point of juncture between the

Ceno and the Taro, we find Fornovo. Beyond the village the valley

broadens out once more, disclosing Apennines capped with winter snow.

To the right descends the Ceno. To the left foams the Taro, following

whose rocky channel we should come at last to Pontremoli and the

Tyrrhenian sea beside Sarzana. On a May-day of sunshine like the

present, the Taro is a gentle stream. A waggon drawn by two white oxen

has just entered its channel, guided by a contadino with goat-skin

leggings, wielding a long goad. The patient creatures stem the water,

which rises to the peasant's thighs and ripples round the creaking

wheels. Swaying to and fro, as the shingles shift upon the river-bed,

they make their way across; and now they have emerged upon the stones;

and now we lose them in a flood of sunlight.

It was by this pass that Charles VIII. in 1495 returned from Tuscany,

when the army of the League was drawn up waiting to intercept and

crush him in the mousetrap of Fornovo. No road remained for Charles

and his troops but the rocky bed of the Taro, running, as I have

described it, between the spurs of steep hills. It is true that the

valley of the Baganza leads, from a little higher up among the

mountains, into Lombardy. But this pass runs straight to Parma; and to

follow it would have brought the French upon the walls of a strong

city. Charles could not do otherwise than descend upon the village of

Fornovo, and cut his way thence in the teeth of the Italian army over

stream and boulder between the gorges of throttling mountain. The

failure of the Italians to achieve what here upon the ground appears

so simple, delivered Italy hand-bound to strangers. Had they but

succeeded in arresting Charles and destroying his forces at Fornovo,

it is just possible that then--even then, at the eleventh hour--Italy

might have gained the sense of national coherence, or at least have

proved herself capable of holding by her leagues the foreigner at bay.

As it was, the battle of Fornovo, in spite of Venetian bonfires and

Mantuan Madonnas of Victory, made her conscious of incompetence and

convicted her of cowardice. After Fornovo, her sons scarcely dared to

hold their heads up in the field against invaders; and the battles

fought upon her soil were duels among aliens for the prize of Italy.

In order to comprehend the battle of Fornovo in its bearings on

Italian history, we must go back to the year 1492, and understand the

conditions of the various States of Italy at that date. On April 8 in

that year, Lorenzo de' Medici, who had succeeded in maintaining a

political equilibrium in the peninsula, expired, and was succeeded by

his son Piero, a vain and foolhardy young man, from whom no guidance

could be expected. On July 25, Innocent VIII. died, and was succeeded

by the very worst Pope who has ever occupied S. Peter's chair,

Roderigo Borgia, Alexander VI. It was felt at once that the old order

of things had somehow ended, and that a new era, the destinies of

which as yet remained incalculable, was opening for Italy. The chief

Italian powers, hitherto kept in equipoise by the diplomacy of Lorenzo

de' Medici, were these--the Duchy of Milan, the Republic of Venice,

the Republic of Florence, the Papacy, and the kingdom of Naples.

Minor States, such as the Republics of Genoa and Siena, the Duchies of

Urbino and Ferrara, the Marquisate of Mantua, the petty tyrannies of

Romagna, and the wealthy city of Bologna, were sufficiently important

to affect the balance of power, and to produce new combinations. For

the present purpose it is, however, enough to consider the five great

Powers.

After the peace of Constance, which freed the Lombard Communes from

Imperial interference in the year 1183, Milan, by her geographical

position, rose rapidly to be the first city of North Italy. Without

narrating the changes by which she lost her freedom as a Commune, it

is enough to state that, earliest of all Italian cities, Milan passed

into the hands of a single family. The Visconti managed to convert

this flourishing commonwealth, with all its dependencies, into their

private property, ruling it exclusively for their own profit, using

its municipal institutions as the machinery of administration, and

employing the taxes which they raised upon its wealth for purely

selfish ends. When the line of the Visconti ended in the year 1447,

their tyranny was continued by Francesco Sforza, the son of a poor

soldier of adventure, who had raised himself by his military genius,

and had married Bianca, the illegitimate daughter of the last

Visconti. On the death of Francesco Sforza in 1466, he left two sons,

Galeazzo Maria and Lodovico, surnamed Il Moro, both of whom were

destined to play a prominent part in history. Galeazzo Maria,

dissolute, vicious, and cruel to the core, was murdered by his injured

subjects in the year 1476. His son, Giovanni Galeazzo, aged eight,

would in course of time have succeeded to the Duchy, had it not been

for the ambition of his uncle Lodovico. Lodovico contrived to name

himself as Regent for his nephew, whom he kept, long after he had come

of age, in a kind of honourable prison. Virtual master in Milan, but

without a legal title to the throne, unrecognised in his authority by

the Italian powers, and holding it from day to day by craft and fraud,

Lodovico at last found his situation untenable; and it was this

difficulty of an usurper to maintain himself in his despotism which,

as we shall see, brought the French into Italy.

Venice, the neighbour and constant foe of Milan, had become a close

oligarchy by a process of gradual constitutional development, which

threw her government into the hands of a few nobles. She was

practically ruled by the hereditary members of the Grand Council. Ever

since the year 1453, when Constantinople fell beneath the Turk, the

Venetians had been more and more straitened in their Oriental

commerce, and were thrown back upon the policy of territorial

aggrandisement in Italy, from which they had hitherto refrained as

alien to the temperament of the Republic. At the end of the fifteenth

century Venice therefore became an object of envy and terror to the

Italian States. They envied her because she alone was tranquil,

wealthy, powerful, and free. They feared her because they had good

reason to suspect her of encroachment; and it was foreseen that if she

got the upper hand in Italy, all Italy would be the property of the

families inscribed upon the Golden Book. It was thus alone that the

Italians comprehended government. The principle of representation

being utterly unknown, and the privileged burghers in each city being

regarded as absolute and lawful owners of the city and of everything

belonging to it, the conquest of a town by a republic implied the

political extinction of that town and the disfranchisement of its

inhabitants in favour of the conquerors.

Florence at this epoch still called itself a Republic; and of all

Italian commonwealths it was by far the most democratic. Its history,

unlike that of Venice, had been the history of continual and brusque

changes, resulting in the destruction of the old nobility, in the

equalisation of the burghers, and in the formation of a new

aristocracy of wealth. Prom this class of _bourgeois_ nobles sprang

the Medici, who, by careful manipulation of the State machinery, by

the creation of a powerful party devoted to their interests, by

flattery of the people, by corruption, by taxation, and by constant

scheming, raised themselves to the first place in the commonwealth,

and became its virtual masters. In the year 1492 Lorenzo de' Medici,

the most remarkable chief of this despotic family, died, bequeathing

his supremacy in the Republic to a son of marked incompetence.

Since the Pontificate of Nicholas V. the See of Rome had entered upon

a new period of existence. The Popes no longer dreaded to reside in

Rome, but were bent upon making the metropolis of Christendom both

splendid as a seat of art and learning, and also potent as the capital

of a secular kingdom. Though their fiefs in Romagna and the March were

still held but loosely, though their provinces swarmed with petty

despots who defied the Papal authority, and though the princely Roman

houses of Colonna and Orsini were still strong enough to terrorise the

Holy Father in the Vatican, it was now clear that the Papal See must

in the end get the better of its adversaries, and consolidate itself

into a first-rate Power. The internal spirit of the Papacy at this

time corresponded to its external policy. It was thoroughly

secularised by a series of worldly and vicious pontiffs, who had clean

forgotten what their title, Vicar of Christ, implied. They

consistently used their religious prestige to enforce their secular

authority, while by their temporal power they caused their religious

claims to be respected. Corrupt and shameless, they indulged

themselves in every vice, openly acknowledged their children, and

turned Italy upside down in order to establish favourites and bastards

in the principalities they seized as spoils of war.

The kingdom of Naples differed from any other state of Italy. Subject

continually to foreign rulers since the decay of the Greek Empire,

governed in succession by the Normans, the Hohenstauffens, and the

House of Anjou, it had never enjoyed the real independence, or the

free institutions, of the northern provinces; nor had it been

Italianised in the same sense as the rest of the peninsula. Despotism,

which assumed so many forms in Italy, was here neither the tyranny of

a noble house, nor the masked autocracy of a burgher, nor yet the

forceful sway of a condottiere. It had a dynastic character,

resembling the monarchy of one of the great European nations, but

modified by the peculiar conditions of Italian statecraft. Owing to

this dynastic and monarchical complexion of the Neapolitan kingdom,

semi-feudal customs flourished in the south far more than in the north

of Italy. The barons were more powerful; and the destinies of the

Regno often turned upon their feuds and quarrels with the Crown. At

the same time the Neapolitan despots shared the uneasy circumstances

of all Italian potentates, owing to the uncertainty of their tenure,

both as conquerors and aliens, and also as the nominal vassals of the

Holy See. The rights of suzerainty which the Normans had yielded to

the Papacy over their southern conquests, and which the Popes had

arbitrarily exercised in favour of the Angevine princes, proved a

constant source of peril to the rest of Italy by rendering the

succession to the crown of Naples doubtful. On the extinction of the

Angevine line, however, the throne was occupied by a prince who had no

valid title but that of the sword to its possession. Alfonso of Aragon

conquered Naples in 1442, and neglecting his hereditary dominion,

settled in his Italian capital. Possessed with the enthusiasm for

literature which was then the ruling passion of the Italians, and very

liberal to men of learning, Alfonso won for himself the surname of

Magnanimous. On his death, in 1458, he bequeathed his Spanish

kingdom, together with Sicily and Sardinia, to his brother, and left

the fruits of his Italian conquest to his bastard, Ferdinand. This

Ferdinand, whose birth was buried in profound obscurity, was the

reigning sovereign in the year 1492. Of a cruel and sombre

temperament, traitorous and tyrannical, Ferdinand was hated by his

subjects as much as Alfonso had been loved. He possessed, however, to

a remarkable degree, the qualities which at that epoch constituted a

consummate statesman; and though the history of his reign is the

history of plots and conspiracies, of judicial murders and forcible

assassinations, of famines produced by iniquitous taxation, and of

every kind of diabolical tyranny, Ferdinand contrived to hold his own,

in the teeth of a rebellious baronage or a maddened population. His

political sagacity amounted almost to a prophetic instinct in the last

years of his life, when he became aware that the old order was

breaking up in Italy, and had cause to dread that Charles VIII. of

France would prove his title to the kingdom of Naples by force of

arms.[13]

Such were the component parts of the Italian body politic, with the

addition of numerous petty principalities and powers, adhering more or

less consistently to one or other of the greater States. The whole

complex machine was bound together by no sense of common interest,

animated by no common purpose, amenable to no central authority. Even

such community of feeling as one spoken language gives, was lacking.

And yet Italy distinguished herself clearly from the rest of Europe,

not merely as a geographical fact, but also as a people intellectually

and spiritually one. The rapid rise of humanism had aided in producing

this national self-consciousness. Every State and every city was

absorbed in the recovery of culture and in the development of art and

literature. Far in advance of the other European nations, the Italians

regarded the rest of the world as barbarous, priding themselves the

while, in spite of mutual jealousies and hatreds, on their Italic

civilisation. They were enormously wealthy. The resources of the Papal

treasury, the private fortunes of the Florentine bankers, the riches

of the Venetian merchants might have purchased all that France or

Germany possessed of value. The single Duchy of Milan yielded to its

masters 700,000 golden florins of revenue, according to the

computation of De Comines. In default of a confederative system, the

several States were held in equilibrium by diplomacy. By far the most

important people, next to the despots and the captains of adventure,

were ambassadors and orators. War itself had become a matter of

arrangement, bargain, and diplomacy. The game of stratagem was played

by generals who had been friends yesterday and might be friends again

to-morrow, with troops who felt no loyalty whatever for the standards

under which they listed. To avoid slaughter and to achieve the ends of

warfare by parade and demonstration was the interest of every one

concerned. Looking back upon Italy of the fifteenth century, taking

account of her religious deadness and moral corruption, estimating the

absence of political vigour in the republics and the noxious tyranny

of the despots, analysing her lack of national spirit, and comparing

her splendid life of cultivated ease with the want of martial energy,

we can see but too plainly that contact with a simpler and stronger

people could not but produce a terrible catastrophe. The Italians

themselves, however, were far from comprehending this. Centuries of

undisturbed internal intrigue had accustomed them to play the game of

forfeits with each other, and nothing warned them that the time was

come at which diplomacy, finesse, and craft would stand them in ill

stead against rapacious conquerors.

The storm which began to gather over Italy in the year 1492 had its

first beginning in the North. Lodovico Sforza's position in the Duchy

of Milan was becoming every day more difficult, when a slight and to

all appearances insignificant incident converted his apprehension of

danger into panic. It was customary for the States of Italy to

congratulate a new Pope on his election by their ambassadors; and this

ceremony had now to be performed for Roderigo Borgia. Lodovico

proposed that his envoys should go to Rome together with those of

Venice, Naples, and Florence; but Piero de' Medici, whose vanity made

him wish to send an embassy in his own name, contrived that Lodovico's

proposal should be rejected both by Florence and the King of Naples.

So strained was the situation of Italian affairs that Lodovico saw in

this repulse a menace to his own usurped authority. Feeling himself

isolated among the princes of his country, rebuffed by the Medici, and

coldly treated by the King of Naples, he turned in his anxiety to

France, and advised the young king, Charles VIII., to make good his

claim upon the Regno. It was a bold move to bring the foreigner thus

into Italy; and even Lodovico, who prided himself upon his sagacity,

could not see how things would end. He thought his situation so

hazardous, however, that any change must be for the better. Moreover,

a French invasion of Naples would tie the hands of his natural foe,

King Ferdinand, whose granddaughter, Isabella of Aragon, had married

Giovanni Galeazzo Sforza, and was now the rightful Duchess of Milan.

When the Florentine ambassador at Milan asked him how he had the

courage to expose Italy to such peril, his reply betrayed the egotism

of his policy: 'You talk to me of Italy; but when have I looked Italy

in the face? No one ever gave a thought to my affairs. I have,

therefore, had to give them such security as I could.'

Charles VIII. was young, light-brained, romantic, and ruled by

_parvenus_, who had an interest in disturbing the old order of the

monarchy. He lent a willing ear to Lodovico's invitation, backed as

this was by the eloquence and passion of numerous Italian refugees and

exiles. Against the advice of his more prudent counsellors, he taxed

all the resources of his kingdom, and concluded treaties on

disadvantageous terms with England, Germany, and Spain, in order that

he might be able to concentrate all his attention upon the Italian

expedition. At the end of the year 1493, it was known that the

invasion was resolved upon. Gentile Becchi, the Florentine envoy at

the Court of France, wrote to Piero de' Medici: 'If the King succeeds,

it is all over with Italy--_tutta a bordello._' The extraordinary

selfishness of the several Italian States at this critical moment

deserves to be noticed. The Venetians, as Paolo Antonio Soderini

described them to Piero de' Medici, 'are of opinion that to keep

quiet, and to see other potentates of Italy spending and suffering,

cannot but be to their advantage. They trust no one, and feel sure

they have enough money to be able at any moment to raise sufficient

troops, and so to guide events according to their inclinations.' As

the invasion was directed against Naples, Ferdinand of Aragon

displayed the acutest sense of the situation. 'Frenchmen,' he

exclaimed, in what appears like a prophetic passion when contrasted

with the cold indifference of others no less really menaced, 'have

never come into Italy without inflicting ruin; and this invasion, if

rightly considered, cannot but bring universal ruin, although it seems

to menace us alone.' In his agony Ferdinand applied to Alexander VI.

But the Pope looked coldly upon him, because the King of Naples, with

rare perspicacity, had predicted that his elevation to the Papacy

would prove disastrous to Christendom. Alexander preferred to ally

himself with Venice and Milan. Upon this Ferdinand wrote as follows:

'It seems fated that the Popes should leave no peace in Italy. We are

compelled to fight; but the Duke of Bari (_i.e._ Lodovico Sforza)

should think what may ensue from the tumult he is stirring up. He who

raises this wind will not be able to lay the tempest when he likes.

Let him look to the past, and he will see how every time that our

internal quarrels have brought Powers from beyond the Alps into Italy,

these have oppressed and lorded over her.'

Terribly verified as these words were destined to be,--and they were

no less prophetic in their political sagacity than Savonarola's

prediction of the Sword and bloody Scourge,--it was now too late to

avert the coming ruin. On March 1, 1494, Charles was with his army at

Lyons. Early in September he had crossed the pass of Mont Genêvre and

taken up his quarters in the town of Asti. There is no need to

describe in detail the holiday march of the French troops through

Lombardy, Tuscany, and Rome, until, without having struck a blow of

consequence, the gates of Naples opened to receive the conqueror upon

February 22, 1495. Philippe de Comines, who parted from the King at

Asti and passed the winter as his envoy at Venice, has more than once

recorded his belief that nothing but the direct interposition of

Providence could have brought so mad an expedition to so successful a

conclusion. 'Dieu monstroit conduire l'entreprise,' No sooner,

however, was Charles installed in Naples than the States of Italy

began to combine against him. Lodovico Sforza had availed himself of

the general confusion consequent upon the first appearance of the

French, to poison his nephew. He was, therefore, now the titular, as

well as virtual, Lord of Milan. So far, he had achieved what he

desired, and had no further need of Charles. The overtures he now made

to the Venetians and the Pope terminated in a League between these

Powers for the expulsion of the French from Italy. Germany and Spain

entered into the same alliance; and De Comines, finding himself

treated with marked coldness by the Signory of Venice, despatched a

courier to warn Charles in Naples of the coming danger. After a stay

of only fifty days in his new capital, the French King hurried

northward. Moving quickly through the Papal States and Tuscany, he

engaged his troops in the passes of the Apennines near Pontremoli, and

on July 5, 1495, took up his quarters in the village of Fornovo. De

Comines reckons that his whole fighting force at this time did not

exceed 9,000 men, with fourteen pieces of artillery. Against him at

the opening of the valley was the army of the League, numbering some

35,000 men, of whom three-fourths were supplied by Venice, the rest by

Lodovico Sforza and the German Emperor. Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of

Mantua, was the general of the Venetian forces; and on him, therefore,

fell the real responsibility of the battle.

De Comines remarks on the imprudence of the allies, who allowed

Charles to advance as far as Fornovo, when it was their obvious policy

to have established themselves in the village and so have caught the

French troops in a trap. It was a Sunday when the French marched down

upon Fornovo. Before them spread the plain of Lombardy, and beyond it

the white crests of the Alps. 'We were,' says De Comines, 'in a valley

between two little mountain flanks, and in that valley ran a river

which could easily be forded on foot, except when it is swelled with

sudden rains. The whole valley was a bed of gravel and big stones,

very difficult for horses, about a quarter of a league in breadth, and

on the right bank lodged our enemies.' Any one who has visited Fornovo

can understand the situation of the two armies. Charles occupied the

village on the right bank of the Taro. On the same bank, extending

downward toward the plain, lay the host of the allies; and in order

that Charles should escape them, it was necessary that he should cross

the Taro, just below its junction with the Ceno, and reach Lombardy by

marching in a parallel line with his foes.

All through the night of Sunday it thundered and rained incessantly;

so that on the Monday morning the Taro was considerably swollen. At

seven o'clock the King sent for De Comines, who found him already

armed and mounted on the finest horse he had ever seen. The name of

this charger was _Savoy_. He was black, one-eyed, and of middling

height; and to his great courage, as we shall see, Charles owed life

upon that day. The French army, ready for the march, now took to the

gravelly bed of the Taro, passing the river at a distance of about a

quarter of a league from the allies. As the French left Fornovo, the

light cavalry of their enemies entered the village and began to attack

the baggage. At the same time the Marquis of Mantua, with the flower

of his men-at-arms, crossed the Taro and harassed the rear of the

French host; while raids from the right bank to the left were

constantly being made by sharpshooters and flying squadrons. 'At this

moment,' says De Comines, 'not a single man of us could have escaped

if our ranks had once been broken.' The French army was divided into

three main bodies. The vanguard consisted of some 350 men-at-arms,

3000 Switzers, 300 archers of the Guard, a few mounted crossbow-men,

and the artillery. Next came the Battle, and after this the rearguard.

At the time when the Marquis of Mantua made his attack, the French

rearguard had not yet crossed the river. Charles quitted the van, put

himself at the head of his chivalry, and charged the Italian horsemen,

driving them back, some to the village and others to their camp. De

Comines observes, that had the Italian knights been supported in this

passage of arms by the light cavalry of the Venetian force, called

Stradiots, the French must have been outnumbered, thrown into

confusion, and defeated. As it was, these Stradiots were engaged in

plundering the baggage of the French; and the Italians, accustomed to

bloodless encounters, did not venture, in spite of their immense

superiority of numbers, to renew the charge. In the pursuit of

Gonzaga's horsemen Charles outstripped his staff, and was left almost

alone to grapple with a little band of mounted foemen. It was here

that his noble horse, Savoy, saved his person by plunging and charging

till assistance came up from the French, and enabled the King to

regain his van.

It is incredible, considering the nature of the ground and the number

of the troops engaged, that the allies should not have returned to the

attack and have made the passage of the French into the plain

impossible. De Comines, however, assures us that the actual engagement

only lasted a quarter of an hour, and the pursuit of the Italians

three quarters of an hour. After they had once resolved to fly, they

threw away their lances and betook themselves to Reggio and Parma. So

complete was their discomfiture, that De Comines gravely blames the

want of military genius and adventure in the French host. If, instead

of advancing along the left bank of the Taro and there taking up his

quarters for the night, Charles had recrossed the stream and pursued

the army of the allies, he would have had the whole of Lombardy at his

discretion. As it was, the French army encamped not far from the scene

of the action in great discomfort and anxiety. De Comines had to

bivouac in a vineyard, without even a mantle to wrap round him, having

lent his cloak to the King in the morning; and as it had been pouring

all day, the ground could not have afforded very luxurious quarters.

The same extraordinary luck which had attended the French in their

whole expedition, now favoured their retreat; and the same

pusillanimity which the allies had shown at Fornovo, prevented them

from re-forming and engaging with the army of Charles upon the plain.

One hour before daybreak on Tuesday morning, the French broke up their

camp and succeeded in clearing the valley. That night they lodged at

Fiorenzuola, the next at Piacenza, and so on; till on the eighth day

they arrived at Asti without having been so much as incommoded by the

army of the allies in their rear.

Although the field of Fornovo was in reality so disgraceful to the

Italians, they reckoned it a victory upon the technical pretence that

the camp and baggage of the French had been seized. Illuminations and

rejoicings made the piazza of S. Mark in Venice gay, and Francesco da

Gonzaga had the glorious Madonna della Vittoria painted for him by

Mantegna, in commemoration of what ought only to have been remembered

with shame.

A fitting conclusion to this sketch, connecting its close with the

commencement, may be found in some remarks upon the manner of warfare

to which the Italians of the Renaissance had become accustomed, and

which proved so futile on the field of Fornovo. During the middle

ages, and in the days of the Communes, the whole male population of

Italy had fought light-armed on foot. Merchant and artisan left the

counting-house and the workshop, took shield and pike, and sallied

forth to attack the barons in their castles, or to meet the Emperor's

troops upon the field. It was with this national militia that the

citizens of Florence freed their _Contado_ of the nobles, and the

burghers of Lombardy gained the battle of Legnano. In course of time,

by a process of change which it is not very easy to trace, heavily

armed cavalry began to take the place of infantry in mediæval warfare.

Men-at-arms, as they were called, encased from head to foot in iron,

and mounted upon chargers no less solidly caparisoned, drove the

foot-soldiers before them at the points of their long lances. Nowhere

in Italy do they seem to have met with the fierce resistance which the

bears of the Swiss Oberland and the bulls of Uri offered to the

knights of Burgundy. No Tuscan Arnold von Winkelried clasped a dozen

lances to his bosom that the foeman's ranks might thus be broken at

the cost of his own life; nor did it occur to the Italian burghers to

meet the charge of the horsemen with squares protected by bristling

spears. They seem, on the contrary, to have abandoned military service

with the readiness of men whose energies were already absorbed in the

affairs of peace. To become a practised and efficient man-at-arms

required long training and a life's devotion. So much time the

burghers of the free towns could not spare to military service, while

the petty nobles were only too glad to devote themselves to so

honourable a calling. Thus it came to pass that a class of

professional fighting-men was gradually formed in Italy, whose

services the burghers and the princes bought, and by whom the wars of

the peninsula were regularly farmed by contract. Wealth and luxury in

the great cities continued to increase; and as the burghers grew more

comfortable, they were less inclined to take the field in their own

persons, and more disposed to vote large sums of money for the

purchase of necessary aid. At the same time this system suited the

despots, since it spared them the peril of arming their own subjects,

while they taxed them to pay the services of foreign captains. War

thus became a commerce. Romagna, the Marches of Ancona, and other

parts of the Papal dominions, supplied a number of petty nobles whose

whole business in life it was to form companies of trained horsemen,

and with these bands to hire themselves out to the republics and the

despots. Gain was the sole purpose of these captains. They sold their

service to the highest bidder, fighting irrespectively of principle or

patriotism, and passing with the coldest equanimity from the camp of

one master to that of his worst foe. It was impossible that true

military spirit should survive this prostitution of the art of war. A

species of mock warfare prevailed in Italy. Battles were fought with a

view to booty more than victory; prisoners were taken for the sake of

ransom; bloodshed was carefully avoided, for the men who fought on

either side in any pitched field had been comrades with their present

foemen in the last encounter, and who could tell how soon the general

of the one host might not need his rival's troops to recruit his own

ranks? Like every genuine institution of the Italian Renaissance,

warfare was thus a work of fine art, a masterpiece of intellectual

subtlety; and like the Renaissance itself, this peculiar form of

warfare was essentially transitional. The cannon and the musket were

already in use; and it only required one blast of gunpowder to turn

the sham-fight of courtly, traitorous, finessing captains of adventure

into something terribly more real. To men like the Marquis of Mantua

war had been a highly profitable game of skill; to men like the

Maréchal de Gié it was a murderous horseplay; and this difference the

Italians were not slow to perceive. When they cast away their lances

at Fornovo, and fled--in spite of their superior numbers--never to

return, one fair-seeming sham of the fifteenth century became a vision

of the past.

* * * * *

_FLORENCE AND THE MEDICI_

Di Firenze in prima si divisono intra loro i nobili, dipoi i

nobili e il popolo, e in ultimo il popolo e la plebe; e

molte volte occorse che una di queste parti rimasa

superiore, si divise in due.--MACHIAVELLI.

I

Florence, like all Italian cities, owed her independence to the duel

of the Papacy and Empire. The transference of the imperial authority

beyond the Alps had enabled the burghs of Lombardy and Tuscany to

establish a form of self-government. This government was based upon

the old municipal organisation of duumvirs and decemvirs. It was, in

fact, nothing more or less than a survival from the ancient Roman

system. The proof of this was, that while vindicating their rights as

towns, the free cities never questioned the validity of the imperial

title. Even after the peace of Constance in 1183, when Frederick

Barbarossa acknowledged their autonomy, they received within their

walls a supreme magistrate, with power of life and death and ultimate

appeal in all decisive questions, whose title of Potestà indicated

that he represented the imperial power--Potestas. It was not by the

assertion of any right, so much as by the growth of custom, and by the

weakness of the Emperors, that in course of time each city became a

sovereign State. The theoretical supremacy of the Empire prevented any

other authority from taking the first place in Italy. On the other

hand, the practical inefficiency of the Emperors to play their part

encouraged the establishment of numerous minor powers amenable to no

controlling discipline.

The free cities derived their strength from industry, and had nothing

in common with the nobles of the surrounding country. Broadly

speaking, the population of the towns included what remained in Italy

of the old Roman people. This Roman stock was nowhere stronger than in

Florence and Venice--Florence defended from barbarian incursions by

her mountains and marshes, Venice by the isolation of her lagoons. The

nobles, on the contrary, were mostly of foreign origin--Germans,

Franks, and Lombards, who had established themselves as feudal lords

in castles apart from the cities. The force which the burghs acquired

as industrial communities was soon turned against these nobles. The

larger cities, like Milan and Florence, began to make war upon the

lords of castles, and to absorb into their own territory the small

towns and villages around them. Thus in the social economy of the

Italians there were two antagonistic elements ready to range

themselves beneath any banners that should give the form of legitimate

warfare to their mutual hostility. It was the policy of the Church in

the twelfth century to support the cause of the cities, using them as

a weapon against the Empire, and stimulating the growing ambition of

the burghers. In this way Italy came to be divided into the two

world-famous factions known as Guelf and Ghibelline. The struggle

between Guelf and Ghibelline was the struggle of the Papacy for the

depression of the Empire, the struggle of the great burghs face to

face with feudalism, the struggle of the old Italie stock enclosed in

cities with the foreign nobles established in fortresses. When the

Church had finally triumphed by the extirpation of the House of

Hohenstaufen, this conflict of Guelf and Ghibelline was really ended.

Until the reign of Charles V. no Emperor interfered to any purpose in

Italian affairs. At the same time the Popes ceased to wield a

formidable power. Having won the battle by calling in the French, they

suffered the consequences of this policy by losing their hold on Italy

during the long period of their exile at Avignon. The Italians, left

without either Pope or Emperor, were free to pursue their course of

internal development, and to prosecute their quarrels among

themselves. But though the names of Guelf and Ghibelline lost their

old significance after the year 1266 (the date of King Manfred's

death), these two factions had so divided Italy that they continued to

play a prominent part in her annals. Guelf still meant constitutional

autonomy, meant the burgher as against the noble, meant industry as

opposed to feudal lordship. Ghibelline meant the rule of the few over

the many, meant tyranny, meant the interest of the noble as against

the merchant and the citizen. These broad distinctions must be borne

in mind, if we seek to understand how it was that a city like Florence

continued to be governed by parties, the European force of which had

passed away.

II

Florence first rose into importance during the papacy of Innocent III.

Up to this date she had been a town of second-rate distinction even in

Tuscany. Pisa was more powerful by arms and commerce. Lucca was the

old seat of the dukes and marquises of Tuscany. But between the years

1200 and 1250 Florence assumed the place she was to hold

thenceforward, by heading the league of Tuscan cities formed to

support the Guelf party against the Ghibellines. Formally adopting the

Guelf cause, the Florentines made themselves the champions of

municipal liberty in Central Italy; and while they declared war

against the Ghibelline cities, they endeavoured to stamp out the very

name of noble in their State. It is not needful to describe the

varying fortunes of the Guelfs and Ghibellines, the burghers and the

nobles, during the thirteenth and the first half of the fourteenth

centuries. Suffice it to say that through all the vicissitudes of that

stormy period the name Guelf became more and more associated with

republican freedom in Florence. At last, after the final triumph of

that party in 1253, the Guelfs remained victors in the city.

Associating the glory of their independence with Guelf principles, the

citizens of Florence perpetuated within their State a faction that, in

its turn, was destined to prove perilous to liberty.

When it became clear that the republic was to rule itself henceforth

untrammelled by imperial interference, the people divided themselves

into six districts, and chose for each district two Ancients, who

administered the government in concert with the Potestà and the

Captain of the People. The Ancients were a relic of the old Roman

municipal organisation. The Potestà who was invariably a noble

foreigner selected by the people, represented the extinct imperial

right, and exercised the power of life and death within the city. The

Captain of the People, who was also a foreigner, headed the burghers

in their military capacity, for at that period the troops were levied

from the citizens themselves in twenty companies. The body of the

citizens, or the _popolo_, were ultimately sovereigns in the State.

Assembled under the banners of their several companies, they formed a

_parlamento_ for delegating their own power to each successive

government. Their representatives, again, arranged in two councils,

called the Council of the People and the Council of the Commune, under

the presidency of the Captain of the People and the Potestà, ratified

the measures which had previously been proposed and carried by the

executive authority or Signoria. Under this simple State system the

Florentines placed themselves at the head of the Tuscan League, fought

the battles of the Church, asserted their sovereignty by issuing the

golden florin of the republic, and flourished until 1266.

III

In that year an important change was effected in the Constitution.

The whole population of Florence consisted, on the one hand, of nobles

or Grandi, as they were called in Tuscany, and on the other hand of

working people. The latter, divided into traders and handicraftsmen,

were distributed in guilds called Arti; and at that time there were

seven Greater and five Lesser Arti, the most influential of all being

the Guild of the Wool Merchants. These guilds had their halls for

meeting, their colleges of chief officers, their heads, called Consoli

or Priors, and their flags. In 1266 it was decided that the

administration of the commonwealth should be placed simply and wholly

in the hands of the Arti, and the Priors of these industrial companies

became the lords or Signory of Florence. No inhabitant of the city who

had not enrolled himself as a craftsman in one of the guilds could

exercise any function of burghership. To be _scioperato_, or without

industry, was to be without power, without rank or place of honour in

the State. The revolution which placed the Arts at the head of the

republic had the practical effect of excluding the Grandi altogether

from the government. Violent efforts were made by these noble

families, potent through their territorial possessions and foreign

connections, and trained from boyhood in the use of arms, to recover

the place from which the new laws thrust them: but their menacing

attitude, instead of intimidating the burghers, roused their anger and

drove them to the passing of still more stringent laws. In 1293, after

the Ghibellines had been defeated in the great battle of Campaldino, a

series of severe enactments, called the Ordinances of Justice, were

decreed against the unruly Grandi. All civic rights were taken from

them; the severest penalties were attached to their slightest

infringement of municipal law; their titles to land were limited; the

privilege of living within the city walls was allowed them only under

galling restrictions; and, last not least, a supreme magistrate, named

the Gonfalonier of Justice, was created for the special purpose of

watching them and carrying out the penal code against them.

Henceforward Florence was governed exclusively by merchants and

artisans. The Grandi hastened to enrol themselves in the guilds,

exchanging their former titles and dignities for the solid privilege

of burghership. The exact parallel to this industrial constitution for

a commonwealth, carrying on wars with emperors and princes, holding

haughty captains in its pay, and dictating laws to subject cities,

cannot, I think, be elsewhere found in history. It is as unique as the

Florence of Dante and Giotto is unique. While the people was guarding

itself thus stringently against the Grandi, a separate body was

created for the special purpose of extirpating the Ghibellines. A

permanent committee of vigilance, called the College or the Captains

of the Guelf Party, was established. It was their function to

administer the forfeited possessions of Ghibelline rebels, to hunt out

suspected citizens, to prosecute them for Ghibellinism, to judge them,

and to punish them as traitors to the commonwealth. This body, like a

little State within the State, proved formidable to the republic

itself through the unlimited and undefined sway it exercised over

burghers whom it chose to tax with treason. In course of time it

became the oligarchical element within the Florentine democracy, and

threatened to change the free constitution of the city into a

government conducted by a few powerful families.

There is no need to dwell in detail on the internal difficulties of

Florence during the first half of the fourteenth century. Two main

circumstances, however, require to be briefly noticed. These are (i)

the contest of the Blacks and Whites, so famous through the part

played in it by Dante; and (ii) the tyranny of the Duke[1] of Athens,

Walter de Brienne. The feuds of the Blacks and Whites broke up the

city into factions, and produced such anarchy that at last it was

found necessary to place the republic under the protection of foreign

potentates. Charles of Valois was first chosen, and after him the Duke

of Athens, who took up his residence in the city. Entrusted with

dictatorial authority, he used his power to form a military despotism.

Though his reign of violence lasted rather less than a year, it bore

important fruits; for the tyrant, seeking to support himself upon the

favour of the common people, gave political power to the Lesser Arts

at the expense of the Greater, and confused the old State-system by

enlarging the democracy. The net result of these events for Florence

was, first, that the city became habituated to rancorous party-strife,

involving exiles and proscriptions; and, secondly, that it lost its

primitive social hierarchy of classes.

IV

After the Guelfs had conquered the Ghibellines, and the people had

absorbed the Grandi in their guilds, the next chapter in the troubled

history of Florence was the division of the Popolo against itself.

Civil strife now declared itself as a conflict between labour and

capital. The members of the Lesser Arts, craftsmen who plied trades

subordinate to those of the Greater Arts, rose up against their social

and political superiors, demanding a larger share in the government, a

more equal distribution of profits, higher wages, and privileges that

should place them on an absolute equality with the wealthy merchants.

It was in the year 1378 that the proletariate broke out into

rebellion. Previous events had prepared the way for this revolt. First

of all, the republic had been democratised through the destruction of

the Grandi and through the popular policy pursued to gain his own ends

by the Duke of Athens. Secondly, society had been shaken to its very

foundation by the great plague of 1348. Both Boccaccio and Matteo

Villani draw lively pictures of the relaxed morality and loss of order

consequent upon this terrible disaster; nor had thirty years sufficed

to restore their relative position to grades and ranks confounded by

an overwhelming calamity. We may therefore reckon the great plague of

1348 among the causes which produced the anarchy of 1378. Rising in a

mass to claim their privileges, the artisans ejected the Signory from

the Public Palace, and for awhile Florence was at the mercy of the

mob. It is worthy of notice that the Medici, whose name is scarcely

known before this epoch, now came for one moment to the front.

Salvestro de' Medici was Gonfalonier of Justice at the time when the

tumult first broke out. He followed the faction of the handicraftsmen,

and became the hero of the day. I cannot discover that he did more

than extend a sort of passive protection to their cause. Yet there is

no doubt that the attachment of the working classes to the House of

Medici dates from this period. The rebellion of 1378 is known in

Florentine history as the Tumult of the Ciompi. The name Ciompi

strictly means the Wool-Carders. One set of operatives in the city,

and that the largest, gave its title to the whole body of the

labourers. For some months these craftsmen governed the republic,

appointing their own Signory and passing laws in their own interest;

but, as is usual, the proletariate found itself incapable of sustained

government. The ambition and discontent of the Ciompi foamed

themselves away, and industrious working men began to see that trade

was languishing and credit on the wane. By their own act at last they

restored the government to the Priors of the Greater Arti. Still the

movement had not been without grave consequences. It completed the

levelling of classes, which had been steadily advancing from the first

in Florence. After the Ciompi riot there was no longer not only any

distinction between noble and burgher, but the distinction between

greater and lesser guilds was practically swept away. The classes,

parties, and degrees in the republic were so broken up, ground down,

and mingled, that thenceforth the true source of power in the State

was wealth combined with personal ability. In other words, the proper

political conditions had been formed for unscrupulous adventurers.

Florence had become a democracy without social organisation, which

might fall a prey to oligarchs or despots. What remained of deeply

rooted feuds or factions--animosities against the Grandi, hatred for

the Ghibellines, jealousy of labour and capital--offered so many

points of leverage for stirring the passions of the people and for

covering personal ambition with a cloak of public zeal. The time was

come for the Albizzi to attempt an oligarchy, and for the Medici to

begin the enslavement of the State.

V

The Constitution of Florence offered many points of weakness to the

attacks of such intriguers. In the first place it was in its origin

not a political but an industrial organisation--a simple group of

guilds invested with the sovereign authority. Its two most powerful

engines, the Gonfalonier of Justice and the Guelf College, had been

formed, not with a view to the preservation of the government, but

with the purpose of quelling the nobles and excluding a detested

faction. It had no permanent head, like the Doge of Venice; no fixed

senate like the Venetian Grand Council; its chief magistrates, the

Signory, were elected for short periods of two months, and their mode

of election was open to the gravest criticism. Supposed to be chosen

by lot, they were really selected from lists drawn up by the factions

in power from time to time. These factions contrived to exclude the

names of all but their adherents from the bags, or _borse_, in which

the burghers eligible for election had to be inscribed. Furthermore,

it was not possible for this shifting Signory to conduct affairs

requiring sustained effort and secret deliberation; therefore recourse

was being continually had to dictatorial Commissions. The people,

summoned in parliament upon the Great Square, were asked to confer

plenipotentiary authority upon a committee called _Balia_, who

proceeded to do what they chose in the State, and who retained power

after the emergency for which they were created passed away. The same

instability in the supreme magistracy led to the appointment of

special commissioners for war, and special councils, or _Pratiche_,

for the management of each department. Such supplementary commissions

not only proved the weakness of the central authority, but they were

always liable to be made the instruments of party warfare. The Guelf

College was another and a different source of danger to the State. Not

acting under the control of the Signory, but using its own initiative,

this powerful body could proscribe and punish burghers on the mere

suspicion of Ghibellinism. Though the Ghibelline faction had become an

empty name, the Guelf College excluded from the franchise all and

every whom they chose on any pretext to admonish. Under this mild

phrase, _to admonish_, was concealed a cruel exercise of tyranny--it

meant to warn a man that he was suspected of treason, and that he had

better relinquish the exercise of his burghership. By free use of this

engine of Admonition, the Guelf College rendered their enemies

voiceless in the State, and were able to pack the Signory and the

councils with their own creatures. Another important defect in the

Florentine Constitution was the method of imposing taxes. This was

done by no regular system. The party in power made what estimate it

chose of a man's capacity to bear taxation, and called upon him for

extraordinary loans. In this way citizens were frequently driven into

bankruptcy and exile; and since to be a debtor to the State deprived a

burgher of his civic rights, severe taxation was one of the best ways

of silencing and neutralising a dissentient.

I have enumerated these several causes of weakness in the Florentine

State-system, partly because they show how irregularly the

Constitution had been formed by the patching and extension of a simple

industrial machine to suit the needs of a great commonwealth; partly

because it was through these defects that the democracy merged

gradually into a despotism. The art of the Medici consisted in a

scientific comprehension of these very imperfections, a methodic use

of them for their own purposes, and a steady opposition to any

attempts made to substitute a stricter system. The Florentines had

determined to be an industrial community, governing themselves on the

co-operative principle, dividing profits, sharing losses, and exposing

their magistrates to rigid scrutiny. All this in theory was excellent.

Had they remained an unambitious and peaceful commonwealth, engaged in

the wool and silk trade, it might have answered. Modern Europe might

have admired the model of a communistic and commercial democracy. But

when they engaged in aggressive wars, and sought to enslave

sister-cities like Pisa and Lucca, it was soon found that their simple

trading constitution would not serve. They had to piece it out with

subordinate machinery, cumbrous, difficult to manage, ill-adapted to

the original structure. Each limb of this subordinate machinery,

moreover, was a _point d'appui_ for insidious and self-seeking party

leaders.

Florence, in the middle of the fourteenth century, was a vast beehive

of industry. Distinctions of rank among burghers, qualified to vote

and hold office, were theoretically unknown. Highly educated men, of

more than princely wealth, spent their time in shops and

counting-houses, and trained their sons to follow trades. Military

service at this period was abandoned by the citizens; they preferred

to pay mercenary troops for the conduct of their wars. Nor was there,

as in Venice, any outlet for their energies upon the seas. Florence

had no navy, no great port--she only kept a small fleet for the

protection of her commerce. Thus the vigour of the commonwealth was

concentrated on itself; while the influence of the citizens, through

their affiliated trading-houses, correspondents, and agents, extended

like a network over Europe. In a community of this kind it was natural

that wealth--rank and titles being absent--should alone confer

distinction. Accordingly we find that out of the very bosom of the

people a new plutocratic aristocracy begins to rise. The Grandi are

no more; but certain families achieve distinction by their riches,

their numbers, their high spirit, and their ancient place of honour in

the State. These nobles of the purse obtained the name of _Popolani

Nobili_; and it was they who now began to play at high stakes for the

supreme power. In all the subsequent vicissitudes of Florence every

change takes place by intrigue and by clever manipulation of the

political machine. Recourse is rarely had to violence of any kind, and

the leaders of revolutions are men of the yard-measure, never of the

sword. The despotism to which the republic eventually succumbed was no

less commercial than the democracy had been. Florence in the days of

her slavery remained a _Popolo_.

VI

The opening of the second half of the fourteenth century had been

signalised by the feuds of two great houses, both risen from the

people. These were the Albizzi and the Ricci. At this epoch there had

been a formal closing of the lists of burghers;--henceforth no new

families who might settle in the city could claim the franchise, vote

in the assemblies, or hold magistracies. The Guelf College used their

old engine of admonition to persecute _novi homines_, whom they

dreaded as opponents. At the head of this formidable organisation the

Albizzi placed themselves, and worked it with such skill that they

succeeded in driving the Ricci out of all participation in the

government. The tumult of the Ciompi formed but an episode in their

career toward oligarchy; indeed, that revolution only rendered the

political material of the Florentine republic more plastic in the

hands of intriguers, by removing the last vestiges of class

distinctions and by confusing the old parties of the State.

When the Florentines in 1387 engaged in their long duel with Gian

Galeazzo Visconti, the difficulty of conducting this war without some

permanent central authority still further confirmed the power of the

rising oligarchs. The Albizzi became daily more autocratic, until in

1393 their chief, Maso degli Albizzi, a man of strong will and prudent

policy, was chosen Gonfalonier of Justice. Assuming the sway of a

dictator he revised the list of burghers capable of holding office,

struck out the private opponents of his house, and excluded all names

but those of powerful families who were well affected towards an

aristocratic government. The great house of the Alberti were exiled in

a body, declared rebels, and deprived of their possessions, for no

reason except that they seemed dangerous to the Albizzi. It was in

vain that the people murmured against these arbitrary acts. The new

rulers were omnipotent in the Signory, which they packed with their

own men, in the great guilds, and in the Guelf College. All the

machinery invented by the industrial community for its self-management

and self-defence was controlled and manipulated by a close body of

aristocrats, with the Albizzi at their head. It seemed as though

Florence, without any visible alteration in her forms of government,

was rapidly becoming an oligarchy even less open than the Venetian

republic. Meanwhile the affairs of the State were most flourishing.

The strong-handed masters of the city not only held the Duke of Milan

in check, and prevented him from turning Italy into a kingdom; they

furthermore acquired the cities of Pisa, Livorno, Arezzo,

Montepulciano, and Cortona, for Florence, making her the mistress of

all Tuscany, with the exception of Siena, Lucca, and Volterra. Maso

degli Albizzi was the ruling spirit of the commonwealth, spending the

enormous sum of 11,500,000 golden florins on war, raising sumptuous

edifices, protecting the arts, and acting in general like a powerful

and irresponsible prince.

In spite of public prosperity there were signs, however, that this

rule of a few families could not last. Their government was only

maintained by continual revision of the lists of burghers, by

elimination of the disaffected, and by unremitting personal industry.

They introduced no new machinery into the Constitution whereby the

people might be deprived of its titular sovereignty, or their own

dictatorship might be continued with a semblance of legality. Again,

they neglected to win over the new nobles (_nobili popolani_) in a

body to their cause; and thus they were surrounded by rivals ready to

spring upon them when a false step should be made. The Albizzi

oligarchy was a masterpiece of art, without any force to sustain it

but the craft and energy of its constructors. It had not grown up,

like the Venetian oligarchy, by the gradual assimilation to itself of

all the vigour in the State. It was bound, sooner or later, to yield

to the renascent impulse of democracy inherent in Florentine

institutions.

VII

Maso degli Albizzi died in 1417. He was succeeded in the government by

his old friend, Niccolo da Uzzano, a man of great eloquence and

wisdom, whose single word swayed the councils of the people as he

listed. Together with him acted Maso's son, Rinaldo, a youth of even

more brilliant talents than his father, frank, noble, and

high-spirited, but far less cautious.

The oligarchy, which these two men undertook to manage, had

accumulated against itself the discontent of overtaxed, disfranchised,

jealous burghers. The times, too, were bad. Pursuing the policy of

Maso, the Albizzi engaged the city in a tedious and unsuccessful war

with Filippo Maria Visconti, which cost 350,000 golden florins, and

brought no credit. In order to meet extraordinary expenses they raised

new public loans, thereby depreciating the value of the old Florentine

funds. "What was worse, they imposed forced subsidies with grievous

inequality upon the burghers, passing over their friends and

adherents, and burdening their opponents with more than could be

borne. This imprudent financial policy began the ruin of the Albizzi.

It caused a clamour in the city for a new system of more just

taxation, which was too powerful to be resisted. The voice of the

people made itself loudly heard; and with the people on this occasion

sided Giovanni de' Medici. This was in 1427.

It is here that the Medici appear upon that memorable scene where in

the future they are to play the first part. Giovanni de' Medici did

not belong to the same branch of his family as the Salvestro who

favoured the people at the time of the Ciompi Tumult. But he adopted

the same popular policy. To his sons Cosimo and Lorenzo he bequeathed

on his deathbed the rule that they should invariably adhere to the

cause of the multitude, found their influence on that, and avoid the

arts of factious and ambitious leaders. In his own life he had pursued

this course of conduct, acquiring a reputation for civic moderation

and impartiality that endeared him to the people and stood his

children in good stead. Early in his youth Giovanni found himself

almost destitute by reason of the imposts charged upon him by the

oligarchs. He possessed, however, the genius for money-making to a

rare degree, and passed his manhood as a banker, amassing the largest

fortune of any private citizen in Italy. In his old age he devoted

himself to the organisation of his colossal trading business, and

abstained, as far as possible, from political intrigues. Men observed

that they rarely met him in the Public Palace or on the Great Square.

Cosimo de' Medici was thirty years old when his father Giovanni died,

in 1429. During his youth he had devoted all his time and energy to

business, mastering the complicated affairs of Giovanni's

banking-house, and travelling far and wide through Europe to extend

its connections. This education made him a consummate financier; and

those who knew him best were convinced that his ambition was set on

great things. However quietly he might begin, it was clear that he

intended to match himself, as a leader of the plebeians, against the

Albizzi. The foundations he prepared for future action were equally

characteristic of the man, of Florence, and of the age. Commanding the

enormous capital of the Medicean bank he contrived, at any sacrifice

of temporary convenience, to lend money to the State for war expenses,

engrossing in his own hands a large portion of the public debt of

Florence. At the same time his agencies in various European capitals

enabled him to keep his own wealth floating far beyond the reach of

foes within the city. A few years of this system ended in so complete

a confusion between Cosimo's trade and the finances of Florence that

the bankruptcy of the Medici, however caused, would have compromised

the credit of the State and the fortunes of the fund-holders. Cosimo,

in a word, made himself necessary to Florence by the wise use of his

riches. Furthermore, he kept his eye upon the list of burghers,

lending money to needy citizens, putting good things in the way of

struggling traders, building up the fortunes of men who were disposed

to favour his party in the State, ruining his opponents by the

legitimate process of commercial competition, and, when occasion

offered, introducing new voters into the Florentine Council by paying

off the debts of those who were disqualified by poverty from using the

franchise. While his capital was continually increasing he lived

frugally, and employed his wealth solely for the consolidation of his

political influence. By these arts Cosimo became formidable to the

oligarchs and beloved by the people. His supporters were numerous, and

held together by the bonds of immediate necessity or personal

cupidity. The plebeians and the merchants were all on his side. The

Grandi and the Ammoniti, excluded from the State by the practices of

the Albizzi, had more to hope from the Medicean party than from the

few families who still contrived to hold the reins of government. It

was clear that a conflict to the death must soon commence between the

oligarchy and this new faction.

VIII

At last, in 1433, war was declared. The first blow was struck by

Rinaldo degli Albizzi, who put himself in the wrong by attacking a

citizen indispensable to the people at large, and guilty of no

unconstitutional act. On September 7th of that year, a year decisive

for the future destinies of Florence, he summoned Cosimo to the Public

Palace, which he had previously occupied with troops at his command.

There he declared him a rebel to the State, and had him imprisoned in

a little square room in the central tower. The tocsin was sounded; the

people were assembled in parliament upon the piazza. The Albizzi held

the main streets with armed men, and forced the Florentines to place

plenipotentiary power for the administration of the commonwealth at

this crisis in the hands of a Balia, or committee selected by

themselves. It was always thus that acts of high tyranny were effected

in Florence. A show of legality was secured by gaining the compulsory

sanction of the people, driven by soldiery into the public square, and

hastily ordered to recognise the authority of their oppressors.

The bill of indictment against the Medici accused them of sedition in

the year 1378--that is, in the year of the Ciompi Tumult--and of

treasonable practice during the whole course of the Albizzi

administration. It also strove to fix upon them the odium of the

unsuccessful war against the town of Lucca. As soon as the Albizzi had

unmasked their batteries, Lorenzo de' Medici managed to escape from

the city, and took with him his brother Cosimo's children to Venice.

Cosimo remained shut up within the little room called Barberia in

Arnolfo's tower. From that high eagle's nest the sight can range

Valdarno far and wide. Florence with her towers and domes lies below;

and the blue peaks of Carrara close a prospect westward than

which, with its villa-jewelled slopes and fertile gardens, there is

nought more beautiful upon the face of earth. The prisoner can have

paid but little heed to this fair landscape. He heard the frequent

ringing of the great bell that called the Florentines to council, the

tramp of armed men on the piazza, the coming and going of the burghers

in the palace halls beneath. On all sides lurked anxiety and fear of

death. Each mouthful he tasted might be poisoned. For many days he

partook of only bread and water, till his gaoler restored his

confidence by sharing all his meals. In this peril he abode

twenty-four days. The Albizzi, in concert with the Balia they had

formed, were consulting what they might venture to do with him. Some

voted for his execution. Others feared the popular favour, and thought

that if they killed Cosimo this act would ruin their own power. The

nobler natures among them determined to proceed by constitutional

measures. At last, upon September 29th, it was settled that Cosimo

should be exiled to Padua for ten years. The Medici were declared

Grandi, by way of excluding them from political rights. But their

property remained untouched; and on October 3rd, Cosimo was released.

On the same day Cosimo took his departure. His journey northward

resembled a triumphant progress. He left Florence a simple burgher; he

entered Venice a powerful prince. Though the Albizzi seemed to have

gained the day, they had really cut away the ground beneath their

feet. They committed the fatal mistake of doing both too much and too

little--too much because they declared war against an innocent man,

and roused the sympathies of the whole people in his behalf; too

little, because they had not the nerve to complete their act by

killing him outright and extirpating his party. Machiavelli, in one of

his profoundest and most cynical critiques, remarks that few men know

how to be thoroughly bad with honour to themselves. Their will is

evil; but the grain of good in them--some fear of public opinion,

some repugnance to committing a signal crime--paralyses their arm at

the moment when it ought to have been raised to strike. He instances

Gian Paolo Baglioni's omission to murder Julius II., when that Pope

placed himself within his clutches at Perugia. He might also have

instanced Rinaldo degli Albizzi's refusal to push things to

extremities by murdering Cosimo. It was the combination of despotic

violence in the exile of Cosimo with constitutional moderation in the

preservation of his life, that betrayed the weakness of the oligarchs

and restored confidence to the Medicean party.

IX

In the course of the year 1434 this party began to hold up its head.

Powerful as the Albizzi were, they only retained the government by

artifice; and now they had done a deed which put at nought their

former arts and intrigues. A Signory favourable to the Medici came

into office, and on September 26th, 1434, Rinaldo in his turn was

summoned to the palace and declared a rebel. He strove to raise the

forces of his party, and entered the piazza at the head of eight

hundred men. The menacing attitude of the people, however, made

resistance perilous. Rinaldo disbanded his troops, and placed himself

under the protection of Pope Eugenius IV., who was then resident in

Florence. This act of submission proved that Rinaldo had not the

courage or the cruelty to try the chance of civil war. Whatever his

motives may have been, he lost his hold upon the State beyond

recovery. On September 29th, a new parliament was summoned; on October

2nd, Cosimo was recalled from exile and the Albizzi were banished. The

intercession of the Pope procured for them nothing but the liberty to

leave Florence unmolested. Einaldo turned his back upon the city he

had governed, never to set foot in it again. On October 6th, Cosimo,

having passed through Padua, Ferrara, and Modena like a conqueror,

reentered the town amid the plaudits of the people, and took up his

dwelling as an honoured guest in the Palace of the Republic. The

subsequent history of Florence is the history of his family. In after

years the Medici loved to remember this return of Cosimo. His

triumphal reception was painted in fresco on the walls of their villa

at Cajano under the transparent allegory of Cicero's entrance into

Rome.

X

By their brief exile the Medici had gained the credit of injured

innocence, the fame of martyrdom in the popular cause. Their foes had

struck the first blow, and in striking at them had seemed to aim

against the liberties of the republic. The mere failure of their

adversaries to hold the power they had acquired, handed over this

power to the Medici; and the reprisals which the Medici began to take

had the show of justice, not of personal hatred, or petty vengeance.

Cosimo was a true Florentine. He disliked violence, because he knew

that blood spilt cries for blood. His passions, too, were cool and

temperate. No gust of anger, no intoxication of success, destroyed his

balance. His one object, the consolidation of power for his family on

the basis of popular favour, was kept steadily in view; and he would

do nothing that might compromise that end. Yet he was neither generous

nor merciful. We therefore find that from the first moment of his

return to Florence he instituted a system of pitiless and unforgiving

persecution against his old opponents. The Albizzi were banished, root

and branch, with all their followers, consigned to lonely and often to

unwholesome stations through the length and breadth of Italy. If they

broke the bonds assigned them, they were forthwith declared traitors

and their property was confiscated. After a long series of years, by

merely keeping in force the first sentence pronounced upon them,

Cosimo had the cruel satisfaction of seeing the whole of that proud

oligarchy die out by slow degrees in the insufferable tedium of

solitude and exile. Even the high-souled Palla degli Strozzi, who had

striven to remain neutral, and whose wealth and talents were devoted

to the revival of classical studies, was proscribed because to Cosimo

he seemed too powerful. Separated from his children, he died in

banishment at Padua. In this way the return of the Medici involved the

loss to Florence of some noble citizens, who might perchance have

checked the Medicean tyranny if they had stayed to guide the State.

The plebeians, raised to wealth and influence by Cosimo before his

exile, now took the lead in the republic. He used these men as

catspaws, rarely putting himself forward or allowing his own name to

appear, but pulling the wires of government in privacy by means of

intermediate agents. The Medicean party was called at first _Puccini_

from a certain Puccio, whose name was better known in caucus or

committee than that of his real master.

To rule through these creatures of his own making taxed all the

ingenuity of Cosimo; but his profound and subtle intellect was suited

to the task, and he found unlimited pleasure in the exercise of his

consummate craft. We have already seen to what extent he used his

riches for the acquisition of political influence. Now that he had

come to power, he continued the same method, packing the Signory and

the Councils with men whom he could hold by debt between his thumb and

finger. His command of the public moneys enabled him to wink at

peculation in State offices; it was part of his system to bind

magistrates and secretaries to his interest by their consciousness of

guilt condoned but not forgotten. Not a few, moreover, owed their

living to the appointments he procured for them. While he thus

controlled the wheel-work of the commonwealth by means of organised

corruption, he borrowed the arts of his old enemies to oppress

dissentient citizens. If a man took an independent line in voting,

and refused allegiance to the Medicean party, he was marked out for

persecution. No violence was used; but he found himself hampered in

his commerce--money, plentiful for others, became scarce for him; his

competitors in trade were subsidised to undersell him. And while the

avenues of industry were closed, his fortune was taxed above its

value, until he had to sell at a loss in order to discharge his public

obligations. In the first twenty years of the Medicean rule, seventy

families had to pay 4,875,000 golden florins of extraordinary imposts,

fixed by arbitrary assessment.

The more patriotic members of his party looked with dread and loathing

on this system of corruption and exclusion. To their remonstrances

Cosimo replied in four memorable sayings: 'Better the State spoiled

than the State not ours.' 'Governments cannot be carried on with

paternosters.' 'An ell of scarlet makes a burgher.' 'I aim at finite

ends.' These maxims represent the whole man,--first, in his egotism,

eager to gain Florence for his family, at any risk of her ruin;

secondly, in his cynical acceptance of base means to selfish ends;

thirdly, in his bourgeois belief that money makes a man, and fine

clothes suffice for a citizen; fourthly, in his worldly ambition bent

on positive success. It was, in fact, his policy to reduce Florence to

the condition of a rotten borough: nor did this policy fail. One

notable sign of the influence he exercised was the change which now

came over the foreign relations of the republic. Up to the date of his

dictatorship Florence had uniformly fought the battle of freedom in

Italy. It was the chief merit of the Albizzi oligarchy that they

continued the traditions of the mediæval State, and by their vigorous

action checked the growth of the Visconti. Though they engrossed the

government they never forgot that they were first of all things

Florentines, and only in the second place men who owed their power and

influence to office. In a word, they acted like patriotic Tories, like

republican patricians. Therefore they would not ally themselves with

tyrants or countenance the enslavement of free cities by armed

despots. Their subjugation of the Tuscan burghs to Florence was itself

part of a grand republican policy. Cosimo changed all this. When the

Visconti dynasty ended by the death of Filippo Maria in 1447, there

was a chance of restoring the independence of Lombardy. Milan in

effect declared herself a republic, and by the aid of Florence she

might at this moment have maintained her liberty. Cosimo, however,

entered into treaty with Francesco Sforza, supplied him with money,

guaranteed him against Florentine interference, and saw with

satisfaction how he reduced the duchy to his military tyranny. The

Medici were conscious that they, selfishly, had most to gain by

supporting despots who in time of need might help them to confirm

their own authority. With the same end in view, when the legitimate

line of the Bentivogli was extinguished, Cosimo hunted out a bastard

pretender of that family, presented him to the chiefs of the

Bentivogli faction, and had him placed upon the seat of his supposed

ancestors at Bologna. This young man, a certain Santi da Cascese,

presumed to be the son of Ercole de' Bentivogli, was an artisan in a

wool factory when Cosimo set eyes upon him. At first Santi refused the

dangerous honour of governing a proud republic; but the intrigues of

Cosimo prevailed, and the obscure craftsman ended his days a powerful

prince.

By the arts I have attempted to describe, Cosimo in the course of his

long life absorbed the forces of the republic into himself. While he

shunned the external signs of despotic power he made himself the

master of the State. His complexion was of a pale olive; his stature

short; abstemious and simple in his habits, affable in conversation,

sparing of speech, he knew how to combine that burgher-like civility

for which the Romans praised Augustus, with the reality of a despotism

all the more difficult to combat because it seemed nowhere and was

everywhere. When he died, at the age of seventy-five, in 1464, the

people whom he had enslaved, but whom he had neither injured nor

insulted, honoured him with the title of _Pater Patriæ_. This was

inscribed upon his tomb in S. Lorenzo. He left to posterity the fame

of a great and generous patron,[14] the infamy of a cynical,

self-seeking, bourgeois tyrant. Such combinations of contradictory

qualities were common enough at the time of the Renaissance. Did not

Machiavelli spend his days in tavern-brawls and low amours, his nights

among the mighty spirits of the dead, with whom, when he had changed

his country suit of homespun for the habit of the Court, he found

himself an honoured equal?

XI

Cosimo had shown consummate skill by governing Florence through a

party created and raised to influence by himself. The jealousy of

these adherents formed the chief difficulty with which his son Piero

had to contend. Unless the Medici could manage to kick down the ladder

whereby they had risen, they ran the risk of losing all. As on a

former occasion, so now they profited by the mistakes of their

antagonists. Three chief men of their own party, Diotisalvi Neroni,

Agnolo Acciaiuoli, and Luca Pitti, determined to shake off the yoke of

their masters, and to repay the Medici for what they owed by leading

them to ruin. Niccolo Soderini, a patriot, indignant at the slow

enslavement of his country, joined them. At first they strove to

undermine the credit of the Medici with the Florentines by inducing

Piero to call in the moneys placed at interest by his father in the

hands of private citizens. This act was unpopular; but it did not

suffice to move a revolution. To proceed by constitutional measures

against the Medici was judged impolitic. Therefore the conspirators

decided to take, if possible, Piero's life. The plot failed, chiefly

owing to the coolness and the cunning of the young Lorenzo, Piero's

eldest son. Public sympathy was strongly excited against the

aggressors. Neroni, Acciaiuoli, and Soderini were exiled. Pitti was

allowed to stay, dishonoured, powerless, and penniless, in Florence.

Meanwhile, the failure of their foes had only served to strengthen the

position of the Medici. The ladder had saved them the trouble of

kicking it down.

The congratulations addressed on this occasion to Piero and Lorenzo by

the ruling powers of Italy show that the Medici were already regarded

as princes outside Florence. Lorenzo and Giuliano, the two sons of

Piero, travelled abroad to the Courts of Milan and Ferrara with the

style and state of more than simple citizens. At home they occupied

the first place on all occasions of public ceremony, receiving royal

visitors on terms of equality, and performing the hospitalities of the

republic like men who had been born to represent its dignities.

Lorenzo's marriage to Clarice Orsini, of the noble Roman house, was

another sign that the Medici were advancing on the way toward

despotism. Cosimo had avoided foreign alliances for his children. His

descendants now judged themselves firmly planted enough to risk the

odium of a princely match for the sake of the support outside the city

they might win.

XII

Piero de' Medici died in December 1469. His son Lorenzo was then

barely twenty-two years of age. The chiefs of the Medicean party,

all-powerful in the State, held a council, in which they resolved to

place him in the same position as his father and grandfather. This

resolve seems to have been formed after mature deliberation, on the

ground that the existing conditions of Italian politics rendered it

impossible to conduct the government without a presidential head.

Florence, though still a democracy, required a permanent chief to

treat on an equality with the princes of the leading cities. Here we

may note the prudence of Cosimo's foreign policy. When he helped to

establish despots in Milan and Bologna he was rendering the presidency

of his own family in Florence necessary.

Lorenzo, having received this invitation, called attention to his

youth and inexperience. Yet he did not refuse it; and, after a

graceful display of diffidence, he accepted the charge, entering thus

upon that famous political career, in the course of which he not only

established and maintained a balance of power in Italy, with Florence

for the central city, but also contrived to remodel the government of

the republic in the interest of his own family and to strengthen the

Medici by relations with the Papal See.

The extraordinary versatility of this man's intellectual and social

gifts, his participation in all the literary and philosophical

interests of his century, his large and liberal patronage of art, and

the gaiety with which he joined the people of Florence in their

pastimes--Mayday games and Carnival festivities--strengthened his hold

upon the city in an age devoted to culture and refined pleasure.

Whatever was most brilliant in the spirit of the Italian Benaissance

seemed to be incarnate in Lorenzo. Not merely as a patron and a

dilettante, but as a poet and a critic, a philosopher and scholar, he

proved himself adequate to the varied intellectual ambitions of his

country. Penetrated with the passion for erudition which distinguished

Florence in the fifteenth century, familiar with her painters and her

sculptors, deeply read in the works of her great poets, he conceived

the ideal of infusing the spirit of antique civility into modern life,

and of effecting for society what the artists were performing in their

own sphere. To preserve the native character of the Florentine genius,

while he added the grace of classic form, was the aim to which his

tastes and instincts led him. At the same time, while he made himself

the master of Florentine revels and the Augustus of Renaissance

literature, he took care that beneath his carnival masks and

ball-dress should be concealed the chains which he was forging for the

republic.

What he lacked, with so much mental brilliancy, was moral greatness.

The age he lived in was an age of selfish despots, treacherous

generals, godless priests. It was an age of intellectual vigour and

artistic creativeness; but it was also an age of mean ambition, sordid

policy, and vitiated principles. Lorenzo remained true in all respects

to the genius of this age: true to its enthusiasm for antique culture,

true to its passion for art, true to its refined love of pleasure; but

true also to its petty political intrigues, to its cynical

selfishness, to its lack of heroism. For Florence he looked no higher

and saw no further than Cosimo had done. If culture was his pastime,

the enslavement of the city by bribery and corruption was the hard

work of his manhood. As is the case with much Renaissance art, his

life was worth more for its decorative detail than for its

constructive design. In richness, versatility, variety, and

exquisiteness of execution, it left little to be desired; yet, viewed

at a distance, and as a whole, it does not inspire us with a sense of

architectonic majesty.

XIII

Lorenzo's chief difficulties arose from the necessity under which,

like Cosimo, he laboured of governing the city through its old

institutions by means of a party. To keep the members of this party in

good temper, and to gain their approval for the alterations he

effected in the State machinery of Florence, was the problem of his

life. The successful solution of this problem was easier now, after

two generations of the Medicean ascendency, than it had been at first.

Meanwhile the people were maintained in good humour by public shows,

ease, plenty, and a general laxity of discipline. The splendour of

Lorenzo's foreign alliances and the consideration he received from all

the Courts of Italy contributed in no small measure to his popularity

and security at home. By using his authority over Florence to inspire

respect abroad, and by using his foreign credit to impose upon the

burghers, Lorenzo displayed the tact of a true Italian diplomatist.

His genius for statecraft, as then understood, was indeed of a rare

order, equally adapted to the conduct of a complicated foreign policy

and to the control of a suspicious and variable Commonwealth. In one

point alone he was inferior to his grandfather. He neglected commerce,

and allowed his banking business to fall into disorder so hopeless

that in course of time he ceased to be solvent. Meanwhile his personal

expenses, both as a prince in his own palace, and as the

representative of majesty in Florence, continually increased. The

bankruptcy of the Medici, it had long been foreseen, would involve the

public finances in serious confusion. And now, in order to retrieve

his fortunes, Lorenzo was not only obliged to repudiate his debts to

the exchequer, but had also to gain complete disposal of the State

purse. It was this necessity that drove him to effect the

constitutional revolution of 1480, by which he substituted a Privy

Council of seventy members for the old Councils of the State,

absorbing the chief functions of the commonwealth into this single

body, whom he practically nominated at pleasure. The same want of

money led to the great scandal of his reign--the plundering of the

Monte delle Doti, or State Insurance Office Fund for securing dowers

to the children of its creditors.

XIV

While tracing the salient points of Lorenzo de' Medici's

administration I have omitted to mention the important events which

followed shortly after his accession to power in 1469. What happened

between that date and 1480 was not only decisive for the future

fortunes of the Casa Medici, but it was also eminently characteristic

of the perils and the difficulties which beset Italian despots. The

year 1471 was signalised by a visit by the Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza

of Milan, and his wife Bona of Savoy, to the Medici in Florence. They

came attended by their whole Court--body guards on horse and foot,

ushers, pages, falconers, grooms, kennel-varlets, and huntsmen.

Omitting the mere baggage service, their train counted two thousand

horses. To mention this incident would be superfluous, had not so

acute an observer as Machiavelli marked it out as a turning-point in

Florentine history. Now, for the first time, the democratic

commonwealth saw its streets filled with a mob of courtiers. Masques,

balls, and tournaments succeeded each other with magnificent variety;

and all the arts of Florence were pressed into the service of these

festivals. Machiavelli says that the burghers lost the last remnant of

their old austerity of manners, and became, like the degenerate

Romans, ready to obey the masters who provided them with brilliant

spectacles. They gazed with admiration on the pomp of Italian

princes, their dissolute and godless living, their luxury and prodigal

expenditure; and when the Medici affected similar habits in the next

generation, the people had no courage to resist the invasion of their

pleasant vices.

In the same year, 1471, Volterra was reconquered for the Florentines

by Frederick of Urbino. The honours of this victory, disgraced by a

brutal sack of the conquered city, in violation of its articles of

capitulation, were reserved for Lorenzo, who returned in triumph to

Florence. More than ever he assumed the prince, and in his person

undertook to represent the State.

In the same year, 1471, Francesco della Rovere was raised to the

Papacy with the memorable name of Sixtus IV. Sixtus was a man of

violent temper and fierce passions, restless and impatiently

ambitious, bent on the aggrandisement of the beautiful and wanton

youths, his nephews. Of these the most aspiring was Girolamo Riario,

for whom Sixtus bought the town of Imola from Taddeo Manfredi, in

order that he might possess the title of count and the nucleus of a

tyranny in the Romagna. This purchase thwarted the plans of Lorenzo,

who wished to secure the same advantages for Florence. Smarting with

the sense of disappointment, he forbade the Roman banker, Francesco

Pazzi, to guarantee the purchase-money. By this act Lorenzo made two

mortal foes--the Pope and Francesco Pazzi. Francesco was a thin, pale,

atrabilious fanatic, all nerve and passion, with a monomaniac

intensity of purpose, and a will inflamed and guided by imagination--a

man formed by nature for conspiracy, such a man, in fact, as Shakspere

drew in Cassius. Maddened by Lorenzo's prohibition, he conceived the

notion of overthrowing the Medici in Florence by a violent blow.

Girolamo Riario entered into his views. So did Francesco Salviati,

Archbishop of Pisa, who had private reasons for hostility. These men

found no difficulty in winning over Sixtus to their plot; nor is it

possible to purge the Pope of participation in what followed. I need

not describe by what means Francesco drew the other members of his

family into the scheme, and how he secured the assistance of armed

cut-throats. Suffice it to say that the chief conspirators, with the

exception of the Count Girolamo, betook themselves to Florence, and

there, after the failure of other attempts, decided to murder Lorenzo

and his brother Giuliano in the cathedral on Sunday, April 26th, 1478.

The moment when the priest at the high altar finished the mass, was

fixed for the assassination. Everything was ready. The conspirators,

by Judas kisses and embracements, had discovered that the young men

wore no protective armour under their silken doublets. Pacing the

aisle behind the choir, they feared no treason. And now the lives of

both might easily have been secured, if at the last moment the courage

of the hired assassins had not failed them. Murder, they said, was

well enough; but they could not bring themselves to stab men before

the newly consecrated body of Christ. In this extremity a priest was

found who, 'being accustomed to churches,' had no scruples. He and

another reprobate were told off to Lorenzo. Francesco de' Pazzi

himself undertook Giuliano. The moment for attack arrived. Francesco

plunged his dagger into the heart of Giuliano. Then, not satisfied

with this death-blow, he struck again, and in his heat of passion

wounded his own thigh. Lorenzo escaped with a flesh-wound from the

poniard of the priest, and rushed into the sacristy, where his friend

Poliziano shut and held the brazen door. The plot had failed; for

Giuliano, of the two brothers, was the one whom the conspirators would

the more willingly have spared. The whole church was in an uproar. The

city rose in tumult. Rage and horror took possession of the people.

They flew to the Palazzo Pubblico and to the houses of the Pazzi,

hunted the conspirators from place to place, hung the archbishop by

the neck from the palace windows, and, as they found fresh victims

for their fury, strung them one by one in a ghastly row at his side

above the Square. About one hundred in all were killed. None who had

joined in the plot escaped; for Lorenzo had long arms, and one man,

who fled to Constantinople, was delivered over to his agents by the

Sultan. Out of the whole Pazzi family only Guglielmo, the husband of

Bianca de' Medici, was spared. When the tumult was over, Andrea del

Castagno painted the portraits of the traitors head-downwards upon the

walls of the Bargello Palace, in order that all men might know what

fate awaited the foes of the Medici and of the State of Florence.[15]

Meanwhile a bastard son of Giuliano's was received into the Medicean

household, to perpetuate his lineage. This child, named Giulio, was

destined to be famous in the annals of Italy and Florence under the

title of Pope Clement VII.

XV

As is usual when such plots miss their mark, the passions excited

redounded to the profit of the injured party. The commonwealth felt

that the blow struck at Lorenzo had been aimed at their majesty.

Sixtus, on the other hand, could not contain his rage at the failure

of so ably planned a _coup de main_. Ignoring that he had sanctioned

the treason, that a priest had put his hand to the dagger, that the

impious deed had been attempted in a church before the very Sacrament

of Christ, whose vicar on earth he was, the Pope now excommunicated

the republic. The reason he alleged was, that the Florentines had

dared to hang an archbishop.

Thus began a war to the death between Sixtus and Florence. The Pope

inflamed the whole of Italy, and carried on a ruinous campaign in

Tuscany. It seemed as though the republic might lose her subject

cities, always ready to revolt when danger threatened the sovereign

State. Lorenzo's position became critical. Sixtus made no secret of

the hatred he bore him personally, declaring that he fought less with

Florence than with the Medici. To support the odium of this long war

and this heavy interdict alone, was more than he could do. His allies

forsook him. Naples was enlisted on the Pope's side. Milan and the

other States of Lombardy were occupied with their own affairs, and

held aloof. In this extremity he saw that nothing but a bold step

could save him. The league formed by Sixtus must be broken up at any

risk, and, if possible, by his own ability. On December 6th, 1479,

Lorenzo left Florence, unarmed and unattended, took ship at Leghorn,

and proceeded to the court of the enemy, King Ferdinand, at Naples.

Ferdinand was a cruel and treacherous sovereign, who had murdered his

guest, Jacopo Piccinino, at a banquet given in his honour. But

Ferdinand was the son of Alfonso, who, by address and eloquence, had

gained a kingdom from his foe and jailor, Filippo Maria Visconti.

Lorenzo calculated that he too, following Alfonso's policy, might

prove to Ferdinand how little there was to gain from an alliance with

Rome, how much Naples and Florence, firmly united together for offence

and defence, might effect in Italy.

Only a student of those perilous times can appreciate the courage and

the genius, the audacity combined with diplomatic penetration,

displayed by Lorenzo at this crisis. He calmly walked into the lion's

den, trusting he could tame the lion and teach it, and all in a few

days. Nor did his expectation fail. Though Lorenzo was rather ugly

than handsome, with a dark skin, heavy brows, powerful jaws, and nose

sharp in the bridge and broad at the nostrils, without grace of

carriage or melody of voice, he possessed what makes up for personal

defects--the winning charm of eloquence in conversation, a subtle wit,

profound knowledge of men, and tact allied to sympathy, which placed

him always at the centre of the situation. Ferdinand received him

kindly. The Neapolitan nobles admired his courage and were fascinated

by his social talents. On March 1st, 1480, he left Naples again,

having won over the King by his arguments. When he reached Florence he

was able to declare that he brought home a treaty of peace and

alliance signed by the most powerful foe of the republic. The success

of this bold enterprise endeared Lorenzo more than ever to his

countrymen. In the same year they concluded a treaty with Sixtus, who

was forced against his will to lay down arms by the capture of Otranto

and the extreme peril of Turkish invasion. After the year 1480 Lorenzo

remained sole master in Florence, the arbiter and peacemaker of the

rest of Italy.

XVI

The conjuration of the Pazzi was only one in a long series of similar

conspiracies. Italian despots gained their power by violence and

wielded it with craft. Violence and craft were therefore used against

them. When the study of the classics had penetrated the nation with

antique ideas of heroism, tyrannicide became a virtue. Princes were

murdered with frightful frequency. Thus Gian Maria Visconti was put to

death at Milan in 1412; Galeazzo Maria Sforza in 1484; the Chiarelli

of Fabriano were massacred in 1435; the Baglioni of Perugia in 1500;

Girolamo Gentile planned the assassination of Galeazzo Sforza at Genoa

in 1476; Niccolo d'Este conspired against his uncle Ercole in 1476;

Stefano Porcari attempted the life of Nicholas V. at Rome in 1453;

Lodovico Sforza narrowly escaped a violent death in 1453. I might

multiply these instances beyond satiety. As it is, I have selected

but a few examples falling, all but one, within the second half of the

fifteenth century. Nearly all these attempts upon the lives of princes

were made in church during the celebration of sacred offices. There

was no superfluity of naughtiness, no wilful sacrilege, in this choice

of an occasion. It only testified to the continual suspicion and

guarded watchfulness maintained by tyrants. To strike at them except

in church was almost impossible. Meanwhile the fate of the

tyrannicides was uniform. Successful or not, they perished. Yet so

grievous was the pressure of Italian despotism, so glorious was the

ideal of Greek and Roman heroism, so passionate the temper of the

people, that to kill a prince at any cost to self appeared the crown

of manliness. This bloodshed exercised a delirious fascination: pure

and base, personal and patriotic motives combined to add intensity of

fixed and fiery purpose to the murderous impulse. Those then who, like

the Medici, aspired to tyranny and sought to found a dynasty of

princes, entered the arena against a host of unknown and unseen

gladiators.

XVII

On his deathbed, in 1492, Lorenzo lay between two men--Angelo

Poliziano and Girolamo Savonarola. Poliziano incarnated the genial,

radiant, godless spirit of fifteenth-century humanism. Savonarola

represented the conscience of Italy, self-convicted, amid all her

greatness, of crimes that called for punishment. It is said that when

Lorenzo asked the monk for absolution, Savonarola bade him first

restore freedom to Florence. Lorenzo, turned his face to the wall and

was silent. How indeed could he make this city in a moment free, after

sixty years of slow and systematic corruption? Savonarola left him,

and he died unshriven. This legend is doubtful, though it rests on

excellent if somewhat partial authority. It has, at any rate, the

value of a mythus, since it epitomises the attitude assumed by the

great preacher to the prince. Florence enslaved, the soul of Lorenzo

cannot lay its burden down, but must go with all its sins upon it to

the throne of God.

The year 1492 was a memorable year for Italy. In this year Lorenzo's

death removed the keystone of the arch that had sustained the fabric

of Italian federation. In this year Roderigo Borgia was elected Pope.

In this year Columbus discovered America; Vasco de Gama soon after

opened a new way to the Indies, and thus the commerce of the world

passed from Italy to other nations. In this year the conquest of

Granada gave unity to the Spanish nation. In this year France, through

the lifelong craft of Louis XI., was for the first time united under a

young hot-headed sovereign. On every side of the political horizon

storms threatened. It was clear that a new chapter of European history

had been opened. Then Savonarola raised his voice, and cried that the

crimes of Italy, the abominations of the Church, would speedily be

punished. Events led rapidly to the fulfilment of this prophecy.

Lorenzo's successor, Piero de' Medici, was a vain, irresolute, and

hasty princeling, fond of display, proud of his skill in fencing and

football-playing, with too much of the Orsini blood in his hot veins,

with too little of the Medicean craft in his weak head. The Italian

despots felt they could not trust Piero, and this want of confidence

was probably the first motive that impelled Lodovico Sforza to call

Charles VIII. into Italy in 1494.

It will not be necessary to dwell upon this invasion of the French,

except in so far as it affected Florence. Charles passed rapidly

through Lombardy, engaged his army in the passes of the Apennines, and

debouched upon the coast where the Magra divided Tuscany from Liguria.

Here the fortresses of Sarzana and Pietra Santa, between the marble

bulwark of Carrara and the Tuscan sea, stopped his further progress.

The keys were held by the Florentines. To force these strong positions

and to pass beyond them seemed impossible. It might have been

impossible if Piero de' Medici had possessed a firmer will. As it was,

he rode off to the French camp, delivered up the forts to Charles,

bound the King by no engagements, and returned not otherwise than

proud of his folly to Florence. A terrible reception awaited him. The

Florentines, in their fury, had risen and sacked the Medicean palace.

It was as much as Piero, with his brothers, could do to escape beyond

the hills to Venice. The despotism of the Medici, so carefully built

up, so artfully sustained and strengthened, was overthrown in a single

day.

XVIII

Before considering what happened in Florence after the expulsion of

the Medici, it will be well to pause a moment and review the state in

which Lorenzo had left his family. Piero, his eldest son, recognised

as chief of the republic after his father's death, was married to

Alfonsina Orsini, and was in his twenty-second year. Giovanni, his

second son, a youth of seventeen, had just been made cardinal. This

honour, of vast importance for the Casa Medici in the future, he owed

to his sister Maddalena's marriage to Franceschetto Cybo, son of

Innocent VIII. The third of Lorenzo's sons, named Giuliano, was a boy

of thirteen. Giulio, the bastard son of the elder Giuliano, was

fourteen. These four princes formed the efficient strength of the

Medici, the hope of the house; and for each of them, with the

exception of Piero, who died in exile, and of whom no more notice need

be taken, a brilliant destiny was still in store. In the year 1495,

however, they now wandered, homeless and helpless, through the cities

of Italy, each of which was shaken to its foundations by the French

invasion.

XIX

Florence, left without the Medici, deprived of Pisa and other subject

cities by the passage of the French army, with no leader but the monk

Savonarola, now sought to reconstitute her liberties. During the

domination of the Albizzi and the Medici the old order of the

commonwealth had been completely broken up. The Arti had lost their

primitive importance. The distinctions between the Grandi and the

Popolani had practically passed away. In a democracy that has

submitted to a lengthened course of tyranny, such extinction of its

old life is inevitable. Yet the passion for liberty was still

powerful; and the busy brains of the Florentines were stored with

experience gained from their previous vicissitudes, from \ the study

of antique history, and from the observation of existing constitutions

in the towns of Italy. They now determined to reorganise the State

upon the model of the Venetian republic. The Signory was to remain,

with its old institution of Priors, Gonfalonier, and College, elected

for brief periods. These magistrates were to take the initiative in

debate, to propose measures, and to consider plans of action. The real

power of the State, for voting supplies and ratifying the measures of

the Signory, was vested in a senate of one thousand members, called

the Grand Council, from whom a smaller body of forty, acting as

intermediates between the Council and the Signory, were elected. It is

said that the plan of this constitution originated with Savonarola;

nor is there any doubt that he used all his influence in the pulpit of

the Duomo to render it acceptable to the people. Whoever may have been

responsible for its formation, the new government was carried in

1495, and a large hall for the assembly of the Grand Council was

opened in the Public Palace.

Savonarola, meanwhile, had become the ruling spirit of Florence. He

gained his great power as a preacher: he used it like a monk. The

motive principle of his action was the passion for reform. To bring

the Church back to its pristine state of purity, without altering its

doctrine or suggesting any new form of creed; to purge Italy of

ungodly customs; to overthrow the tyrants who encouraged evil living,

and to place the power of the State in the hands of sober citizens:

these were his objects. Though he set himself in bold opposition to

the reigning Pope, he had no desire to destroy the spiritual supremacy

of S. Peter's see. Though he burned with an enthusiastic zeal for

liberty, and displayed rare genius for administration, he had no

ambition to rule Florence like a dictator. Savonarola was neither a

reformer in the northern sense of the word, nor yet a political

demagogue. His sole wish was to see purity of manners and freedom of

self-government re-established. With this end in view he bade the

Florentines elect Christ as their supreme chief; and they did so. For

the same end he abstained from appearing in the State Councils, and

left the Constitution to work by its own laws. His personal influence

he reserved for the pulpit; and here he was omnipotent. The people

believed in him as a prophet. They turned to him as the man who knew

what he wanted--as the voice of liberty, the soul of the new régime,

the genius who could breathe into the commonwealth a breath of fresh

vitality. When, therefore, Savonarola preached a reform of manners, he

was at once obeyed. Strict laws were passed enforcing sobriety,

condemning trades of pleasure, reducing the gay customs of Florence to

puritanical austerity.

Great stress has been laid upon this reaction of the monk-led populace

against the vices of the past. Yet the historian is bound to pronounce

that the reform effected by Savonarola was rather picturesque than

vital. Like all violent revivals of pietism, it produced a no less

violent reaction. The parties within the city who resented the

interference of a preaching friar, joined with the Pope in Rome, who

hated a contumacious schismatic in Savonarola. Assailed by these two

forces at the same moment, and driven upon perilous ground by his own

febrile enthusiasm, Savonarola succumbed. He was imprisoned, tortured,

and burned upon the public square in 1498.

What Savonarola really achieved for Florence was not a permanent

reform of morality, but a resuscitation of the spirit of freedom. His

followers, called in contempt _I Piagnoni_, or the Weepers, formed the

path of the commonwealth in future; and the memory of their martyr

served as a common bond of sympathy to unite them in times of trial.

It was a necessary consequence of the peculiar part he played that the

city was henceforth divided into factions representing mutually

antagonistic principles. These factions were not created by

Savonarola; but his extraordinary influence accentuated, as it were,

the humours that lay dormant in the State. Families favourable to the

Medici took the name of _Palleschi_. Men who chafed against

puritanical reform, and who were eager for any government that should

secure them their old licence, were known as _Compagnacci_. Meanwhile

the oligarchs, who disliked a democratic Constitution, and thought it

possible to found an aristocracy without the intervention of the

Medici, came to be known as _Gli Ottimati_. Florence held within

itself, from this epoch forward to the final extinction of liberty,

four great parties: the _Piagnoni_, passionate for political freedom

and austerity of life; the _Palleschi_, favourable to the Medicean

cause, and regretful of Lorenzo's pleasant rule; the _Compagnacci_,

intolerant of the reformed republic, neither hostile nor loyal to the

Medici, but desirous of personal licence; the _Ottimati_, astute and

selfish, watching their own advantage, ever-mindful to form a narrow

government of privileged families, disinclined to the Medici, except

when they thought the Medici might be employed as instruments in their

intrigues.

XX

During the short period of Savonarola's ascendency, Florence was in

form at least a Theocracy, without any titular head but Christ; and as

long as the enthusiasm inspired by the monk lasted, as long as his

personal influence endured, the Constitution of the Grand Council

worked well. After his death it was found that the machinery was too

cumbrous. While adopting the Venetian form of government, the

Florentines had omitted one essential element--the Doge. By referring

measures of immediate necessity to the Grand Council, the republic

lost precious time. Dangerous publicity, moreover, was incurred; and

so large a body often came to no firm resolution. There was no

permanent authority in the State; no security that what had been

deliberated would be carried out with energy; no titular chief, who

could transact affairs with foreign potentates and their ambassadors.

Accordingly, in 1502, it was decreed that the Gonfalonier should hold

office for life--should be in fact a Doge. To this important post of

permanent president Piero Soderini was appointed; and in his hands

were placed the chief affairs of the republic.

At this point Florence, after all her vicissitudes, had won her way to

something really similar to the Venetian Constitution. Yet the

similarity existed more in form than in fact. The government of

burghers in a Grand Council, with a Senate of forty, and a Gonfalonier

for life, had not grown up gradually and absorbed into itself the

vital forces of the commonwealth. It was a creation of inventive

intelligence, not of national development, in Florence. It had against

it the jealousy of the Ottimati, who felt themselves overshadowed by

the Gonfalonier; the hatred of the Palleschi, who yearned for the

Medici; the discontent of the working classes, who thought the

presence of a Court in Florence would improve trade; last, but not

least, the disaffection of the Compagnacci, who felt they could not

flourish to their heart's content in a free commonwealth. Moreover,

though the name of liberty was on every lip, though the Florentines

talked, wrote, and speculated more about constitutional independence

than they had ever done, the true energy of free institutions had

passed from the city. The corrupt government of Cosimo and Lorenzo

bore its natural fruit now. Egotistic ambition and avarice supplanted

patriotism and industry. It is necessary to comprehend these

circumstances, in order that the next revolution may be clearly

understood.

XXI

During the ten years which elapsed between 1502 and 1512, Piero

Soderini administered Florence with an outward show of great

prosperity. He regained Pisa, and maintained an honourable foreign

policy in the midst of the wars stirred up by the League of Cambray.

Meanwhile the young princes of the House of Medici had grown to

manhood in exile. The Cardinal Giovanni was thirty-seven in 1512. His

brother Giuliano was thirty-three. Both of these men were better

fitted than their brother Piero to fight the battles of the family.

Giovanni, in particular, had inherited no small portion of the

Medicean craft. During the troubled reign of Julius II. he kept very

quiet, cementing his connections with powerful men in Rome, but making

no effort to regain his hold on Florence. Now the moment for striking

a decisive blow had come. After the battle of Ravenna in 1512, the

French were driven out of Italy, and the Sforzas returned to Milan;

the Spanish troops, under the Viceroy Cardona, remained masters of the

country. Following the camp of these Spaniards, Giovanni de' Medici

entered Tuscany in August, and caused the restoration of the Medici

to be announced in Florence. The people, assembled by Soderini,

resolved to resist to the uttermost. No foreign army should force them

to receive the masters whom they had expelled. Yet their courage

failed on August 29th, when news reached them of the capture and the

sack of Prato. Prato is a sunny little city a few miles distant from

the walls of Florence, famous for the beauty of its women, the

richness of its gardens, and the grace of its buildings. Into this gem

of cities the savage soldiery of Spain marched in the bright autumnal

weather, and turned the paradise into a hell. It is even now

impossible to read of what they did in Prato without shuddering.[16]

Cruelty and lust, sordid greed for gold, and cold delight in

bloodshed, could go no further. Giovanni de' Medici, by nature mild

and voluptuous, averse to violence of all kinds, had to smile

approval, while the Spanish Viceroy knocked thus with mailed hand for

him at the door of Florence. The Florentines were paralysed with

terror. They deposed Soderini and received the Medici. Giovanni and

Giuliano entered their devastated palace in the Via Larga, abolished

the Grand Council, and dealt with the republic as they listed.

XXII

There was no longer any medium in Florence possible between either

tyranny or some such government as the Medici had now destroyed. The

State was too rotten to recover even the modified despotism of

Lorenzo's days. Each transformation had impaired some portion of its

framework, broken down some of its traditions, and sowed new seeds of

egotism in citizens who saw all things round them change but

self-advantage. Therefore Giovanni and Giuliano felt themselves secure

in flattering the popular vanity by an empty parade of the old

institutions. They restored the Signory and the Gonfalonier, elected

for intervals of two months by officers appointed for this purpose by

the Medici. Florence had the show of a free government. But the Medici

managed all things; and soldiers, commanded by their creature, Paolo

Vettori, held the Palace and the Public Square. The tyranny thus

established was less secure, inasmuch as it openly rested upon

violence, than Lorenzo's power had been; nor were there signs wanting

that the burghers could ill brook their servitude. The conspiracy of

Pietro Paolo Boscoli and Agostino Capponi proved that the Medicean

brothers ran daily risk of life. Indeed, it is not likely that they

would have succeeded in maintaining their authority--for they were

poor and ill-supported by friends outside the city--except for one

most lucky circumstance: that was the election of Giovanni de' Medici

to the Papacy in 1513.

The creation of Leo X. spread satisfaction throughout Italy.

Politicians trusted that he would display some portion of his father's

ability, and restore peace to the nation. Men of arts and letters

expected everything from a Medicean Pope, who had already acquired the

reputation of polite culture and open-handed generosity. They at any

rate were not deceived. Leo's first words on taking his place in the

Vatican were addressed to his brother Giuliano: 'Let us enjoy the

Papacy, now that God has given it to us;' and his notion of enjoyment

was to surround himself with court-poets, jesters, and musicians, to

adorn his Roman palaces with frescoes, to collect statues and

inscriptions, to listen to Latin speeches, and to pass judgment upon

scholarly compositions. Any one and every one who gave him sensual or

intellectual pleasure, found his purse always open. He lived in the

utmost magnificence, and made Rome the Paris of the Renaissance for

brilliance, immorality, and self-indulgent ease. The politicians had

less reason to be satisfied. Instead of uniting the Italians and

keeping the great Powers of Europe in check, Leo carried on a series

of disastrous petty wars, chiefly with the purpose of establishing the

Medici as princes. He squandered the revenues of the Church, and left

enormous debts behind him--an exchequer ruined and a foreign policy so

confused that peace for Italy could only be obtained by servitude.

Florence shared in the general rejoicing which greeted Leo's accession

to the Papacy. He was the first Florentine citizen who had received

the tiara, and the popular vanity was flattered by this honour to the

republic. Political theorists, meanwhile, began to speculate what

greatness Florence, in combination with Rome, might rise to. The Pope

was young; he ruled a large territory, reduced to order by his warlike

predecessors. It seemed as though the republic, swayed by him, might

make herself the first city in Italy, and restore the glories of her

Guelf ascendency upon the platform of Renaissance statecraft. There

was now no overt opposition to the Medici in Florence. How to govern

the city from Rome, and how to advance the fortunes of his brother

Giuliano and his nephew Lorenzo (Piero's son, a young man of

twenty-one), occupied the Pope's most serious attention. For Lorenzo

Leo obtained the Duchy of Urbino and the hand of a French princess.

Giuliano was named Gonfalonier of the Church. He also received the

French title of Duke of Nemours and the hand of Filiberta, Princess of

Savoy. Leo entertained a further project of acquiring the crown of

Southern Italy for his brother, and thus of uniting Rome, Florence,

and Naples under the headship of his house. Nor were the Medicean

interests neglected in the Church. Giulio, the Pope's bastard cousin,

was made cardinal. He remained in Rome, acting as vice-chancellor and

doing the hard work of the Papal Government for the pleasure-loving

pontiff.

To Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, the titular head of the family, was

committed the government of Florence. During their exile, wandering

from court to court in Italy, the Medici had forgotten what it was to

be burghers, and had acquired the manners of princes. Leo alone

retained enough of caution to warn his nephew that the Florentines

must still be treated as free people. He confirmed the constitution of

the Signory and the Privy Council of seventy established by his

father, bidding Lorenzo, while he ruled this sham republic, to avoid

the outer signs of tyranny. The young duke at first behaved with

moderation, but he could not cast aside his habits of a great lord.

Florence now for the first time saw a regular court established in her

midst, with a prince, who, though he bore a foreign title, was in fact

her master. The joyous days of Lorenzo the Magnificent returned.

Masquerades and triumphs filled the public squares. Two clubs of

pleasure, called the Diamond and the Branch--badges adopted by the

Medici to signify their firmness in disaster and their power of

self-recovery--were formed to lead the revels. The best sculptors and

painters devoted their genius to the invention of costumes and cars.

The city affected to believe that the age of gold had come again.

XXIII

Fortune had been very favourable to the Medici. They had returned as

princes to Florence. Giovanni was Pope. Giuliano was Gonfalonier of

the Church. Giulio was Cardinal and Archbishop of Florence. Lorenzo

ruled the city like a sovereign. But this prosperity was no less brief

than it was brilliant. A few years sufficed to sweep off all the

chiefs of the great house. Giuliano died in 1516, leaving only a

bastard son Ippolito. Lorenzo died in 1519, leaving a bastard son

Alessandro, and a daughter, six days old, who lived to be the Queen of

France. Leo died in 1521. There remained now no legitimate male

descendants from the stock of Cosimo. The honours and pretensions of

the Medici devolved upon three bastards--on the Cardinal Giulio, and

the two boys, Alessandro and Ippolito. Of these, Alessandro was a

mulatto, his mother having been a Moorish slave in the Palace of

Urbino; and whether his father was Giulio, or Giuliano, or a base

groom, was not known for certain. To such extremities were the Medici

reduced. In order to keep their house alive, they were obliged to

adopt this foundling. It is true that the younger branch of the

family, descended from Lorenzo, the brother of Cosimo, still

flourished. At this epoch it was represented by Giovanni, the great

general known as the Invincible, whose bust so strikingly resembles

that of Napoleon. But between this line of the Medici and the elder

branch there had never been true cordiality. The Cardinal mistrusted

Giovanni. It may, moreover, be added, that Giovanni was himself doomed

to death in the year 1526.

Giulio de' Medici was left in 1521 to administer the State of Florence

single-handed. He was archbishop, and he resided in the city, holding

it with the grasp of an absolute ruler. Yet he felt his position

insecure. The republic had no longer any forms of self-government; nor

was there a magistracy to whom the despot could delegate his power in

his absence. Giulio's ambition was fixed upon the Papal crown. The

bastards he was rearing were but children. Florence had therefore to

be furnished with some political machinery that should work of itself.

The Cardinal did not wish to give freedom to the city, but clockwork.

He was in the perilous situation of having to rule a commonwealth

without life, without elasticity, without capacity of self-movement,

yet full of such material as, left alone, might ferment, and breed a

revolution. In this perplexity, he had recourse to advisers. The most

experienced politicians, philosophical theorists, practical

diplomatists, and students of antique history were requested to

furnish him with plans for a new constitution, just as you ask an

architect to give you the plan of a new house. This was the field-day

of the doctrinaires. Now was seen how much political sagacity the

Florentines had gained while they were losing liberty. We possess

these several drafts of constitutions. Some recommend tyranny; some

incline to aristocracy, or what Italians called _Governo Stretto_;

some to democracy, or _Governo Largo_; some to an eclectic compound of

the other forms, or _Governo Misto_. More consummate masterpieces of

constructive ingenuity can hardly be imagined. What is omitted in all,

is just what no doctrinaire, no nostrum can communicate--the breath of

life, the principle of organic growth. Things had come, indeed, to a

melancholy pass for Florence when her tyrant, in order to confirm his

hold upon her, had to devise these springs and irons to support her

tottering limbs.

XXIV

While the archbishop and the doctors were debating, a plot was

hatching in the Rucellai Gardens. It was here that the Florentine

Academy now held their meetings. For this society Machiavelli wrote

his 'Treatise on the Art of War,' and his 'Discourses upon Livy.' The

former was an exposition of Machiavelli's scheme for creating a

national militia, as the only safeguard for Italy, exposed at this

period to the invasions of great foreign armies. The latter is one of

the three or four masterpieces produced by the Florentine school of

critical historians. Stimulated by the daring speculations of

Machiavelli, and fired to enthusiasm by their study of antiquity, the

younger academicians formed a conspiracy for murdering Giulio de'

Medici, and restoring the republic on a Roman model. An intercepted

letter betrayed their plans. Two of the conspirators were taken and

beheaded. Others escaped. But the discovery of this conjuration put a

stop to Giulio's scheme of reforming the State. Henceforth he ruled

Florence like a despot, mild in manners, cautious in the exercise of

arbitrary power, but firm in his autocracy. The Condottiere.

Alessandro Vitelli, with a company of soldiers, was taken into service

for the protection of his person and the intimidation of the citizens.

In 1523, the Pope, Adrian VI., expired after a short papacy, from

which he gained no honour and Italy no profit. Giulio hurried to Rome,

and, by the clever use of his large influence, caused himself to be

elected with the title of Clement VII. In Florence he left Silvio

Passerini, Cardinal of Cortona, as his vicegerent and the guardian of

the two boys Alessandro and Ippolito. The discipline of many years had

accustomed the Florentines to a government of priests. Still the

burghers, mindful of their ancient liberties, were galled by the yoke

of a Cortonese, sprung up from one of their subject cities; nor could

they bear the bastards who were being reared to rule them. Foreigners

threw it in their teeth that Florence, the city glorious of art and

freedom, was become a stable for mules--_stalla da muli_, in the

expressive language of popular sarcasm. Bastardy, it may be said in

passing, carried with it small dishonour among the Italians. The

Estensi were all illegitimate; the Aragonese house in Naples sprang

from Alfonso's natural son; and children of Popes ranked among the

princes. Yet the uncertainty of Alessandro's birth and the base

condition of his mother made the prospect of this tyrant peculiarly

odious; while the primacy of a foreign cardinal in the midst of

citizens whose spirit was still unbroken, embittered the cup of

humiliation. The Casa Medici held its authority by a slender thread,

and depended more upon the disunion of the burghers than on any power

of its own. It could always reckon on the favour of the lower

populace, who gained profit and amusement from the presence of a

court. The Ottimati again hoped more from a weak despotism than from a

commonwealth, where their privileges would have been merged in the

mass of the Grand Council. Thus the sympathies of the plebeians and

the selfishness of the rich patricians prevented the republic from

asserting itself. On this meagre basis of personal cupidity the Medici

sustained themselves. What made the situation still more delicate, and

at the same time protracted the feeble rule of Clement, was that

neither the Florentines nor the Medici had any army. Face to face with

a potentate so considerable as the Pope, a free State could not be

established without military force. On the other hand, the Medici,

supported by a mere handful of mercenaries, had no power to resist a

popular rising if any external event should inspire the middle classes

with a hope of liberty.

XXV

Clement assumed the tiara at a moment of great difficulty. Leo had

ruined the finance of Rome. France and Spain were still contending for

the possession of Italy. While acting as Vice-Chancellor, Giulio de'

Medici had seemed to hold the reins with a firm grasp, and men

expected that he would prove a powerful Pope; but in those days he had

Leo to help him; and Leo, though indolent, was an abler man than his

cousin. He planned, and Giulio executed. Obliged to act now for

himself, Clement revealed the weakness of his nature. That weakness

was irresolution, craft without wisdom, diplomacy without knowledge of

men. He raised the storm, and showed himself incapable of guiding it.

This is not the place to tell by what a series of crooked schemes and

cross purposes he brought upon himself the ruin of the Church and

Rome, to relate his disagreement with the Emperor, or to describe

again the sack of the Eternal City by the rabble of the Constable de

Bourbon's army. That wreck of Rome in 1527 was the closing scene of

the Italian Renaissance--the last of the Apocalyptic tragedies

foretold by Savonarola--the death of the old age.

When the Florentines knew what was happening in Rome, they rose and

forced the Cardinal Passerini to depart with the Medicean bastards

from the city. The youth demanded arms for the defence of the town,

and they received them. The whole male population was enrolled in a

militia. The Grand Council was reformed, and the republic was restored

upon the basis of 1495. Niccolo Capponi was elected Gonfalonier. The

name of Christ was again registered as chief of the commonwealth--to

such an extent did the memory of Savonarola still sway the popular

imagination. The new State hastened to form an alliance with France,

and Malatesta Baglioni was chosen as military Commander-in-Chief.

Meanwhile the city armed itself for siege--Michel Angelo Buonarroti

and Francesco da San Gallo undertaking the construction of new forts

and ramparts. These measures were adopted with sudden decision,

because it was soon known that Clement had made peace with the

Emperor, and that the army which had sacked Rome was going to be

marched on Florence.

XXVI

In the month of August 1529 the Prince of Orange assembled his forces

at Terni, and thence advanced by easy stages into Tuscany. As he

approached, the Florentines laid waste their suburbs, and threw down

their wreath of towers, in order that the enemy might have no

harbourage or points of vantage for attack. Their troops were

concentrated within the city, where a new Gonfalonier, Francesco

Carducci, furiously opposed to the Medici, and attached to the

Piagnoni party, now ruled. On September 4th the Prince of Orange

appeared before the walls, and opened the memorable siege. It lasted

eight months, at the end of which time, betrayed by their generals,

divided among themselves, and worn out with delays, the Florentines

capitulated. Florence was paid as compensation for the insult offered

to the pontiff in the sack of Rome.

The long yoke of the Medici had undermined the character of the

Florentines. This, their last glorious struggle for liberty, was but a

flash in the pan--a final flare-up of the dying lamp. The city was not

satisfied with slavery; but it had no capacity for united action. The

Ottimati were egotistic and jealous of the people. The Palleschi

desired to restore the Medici at any price--some of them frankly

wishing for a principality, others trusting that the old

quasi-republican government might still be reinstated. The Red

Republicans, styled Libertini and Arrabbiati, clung together in blind

hatred of the Medicean party; but they had no further policy to guide

them. The Piagnoni, or Frateschi, stuck to the memory of Savonarola,

and believed that angels would descend to guard the battlements when

human help had failed. These enthusiasts still formed the true nerve

of the nation--the class that might have saved the State, if salvation

had been possible. Even as it was, the energy of their fanaticism

prolonged the siege until resistance seemed no longer physically

possible. The hero developed by the crisis was Francesco Ferrucci, a

plebeian who had passed his youth in manual labour, and who now

displayed rare military genius. He fell fighting outside the walls of

Florence. Had he commanded the troops from the beginning, and remained

inside the city, it is just possible that the fate of the war might

have been less disastrous. As it was, Malatesta Baglioni, the

Commander-in-Chief, turned out an arrant scoundrel. He held secret

correspondence with Clement and the Prince of Orange. It was he who

finally sold Florence to her foes, 'putting on his head,' as the Doge

of Venice said before the Senate, 'the cap of the biggest traitor upon

record.'

XXVII

What remains of Florentine history may be briefly told. Clement, now

the undisputed arbiter of power and honour in the city, chose

Alessandro de' Medici to be prince. Alessandro was created Duke of

Cività di Penna, and married to a natural daughter of Charles V.

Ippolito was made a cardinal. Ippolito would have preferred a secular

to a priestly kingdom; nor did he conceal his jealousy for his cousin.

Therefore Alessandro had him poisoned. Alessandro in his turn was

murdered by his kinsman, Lorenzino de' Medici. Lorenzino paid the

usual penalty of tyrannicide some years later. When Alessandro was

killed in 1539, Clement had himself been dead five years. Thus the

whole posterity of Cosimo de' Medici, with the exception of Catherine,

Queen of France, was utterly extinguished. But the Medici had struck

root so firmly in the State, and had so remodelled it upon the type of

tyranny, that the Florentines were no longer able to do without them.

The chiefs of the Ottimati selected Cosimo, the representative of

Giovanni the Invincible, for their prince, and thus the line of the

elder Lorenzo came at last to power. This Cosimo was a boy of

eighteen, fond of field-sports, and unused to party intrigues. When

Francesco Guicciardini offered him a privy purse of one hundred and

twenty thousand ducats annually, together with the presidency of

Florence, this wily politician hoped that he would rule the State

through Cosimo, and realise at last that dream of the Ottimati, a

_Governo Stretto_ or _di Pochi_. He was notably mistaken in his

calculations. The first days of Cosimo's administration showed that

he possessed the craft of his family and the vigour of his immediate

progenitors, and that he meant to be sole master in Florence. He it

was who obtained the title of Grand Duke of Tuscany from the Pope--a

title confirmed by the Emperor, fortified by Austrian alliances, and

transmitted through his heirs to the present century.

XXVIII

In this sketch of Florentine history, I have purposely omitted all

details that did not bear upon the constitutional history of the

republic, or on the growth of the Medici as despots; because I wanted

to present a picture of the process whereby that family contrived to

fasten itself upon the freest and most cultivated State in Italy. This

success the Medici owed mainly to their own obstinacy, and to the

weakness of republican institutions in Florence. Their power was

founded upon wealth in the first instance, and upon the ingenuity with

which they turned the favour of the proletariate to use. It was

confirmed by the mistakes and failures of their enemies, by Rinaldo

degli Albizzi's attack on Cosimo, by the conspiracy of Neroni and

Pitti against Piero, and by Francesco de' Pazzi's attempt to

assassinate Lorenzo. It was still further strengthened by the Medicean

sympathy for arts and letters--a sympathy which placed both Cosimo and

Lorenzo at the head of the Renaissance movement, and made them worthy

to represent Florence, the city of genius, in the fifteenth century.

While thus founding and cementing their dynastic influence upon the

basis of a widespread popularity, the Medici employed persistent

cunning in the enfeeblement of the Republic. It was their policy not

to plant themselves by force or acts of overt tyranny, but to corrupt

ambitious citizens, to secure the patronage of public officers, and to

render the spontaneous working of the State machinery impossible. By

pursuing this policy over a long series of years they made the revival

of liberty in 1494, and again in 1527, ineffectual. While exiled from

Florence, they never lost the hope of returning as masters, so long as

the passions they had excited, and they alone could gratify, remained

in full activity. These passions were avarice and egotism, the greed

of the grasping Ottimati, the jealousy of the nobles, the

self-indulgence of the proletariate. Yet it is probable they might

have failed to recover Florence, on one or other of these two

occasions, but for the accident which placed Giovanni de' Medici on

the Papal chair, and enabled him to put Giulio in the way of the same

dignity. From the accession of Leo in 1513 to the year 1527 the Medici

ruled Florence from Rome, and brought the power of the Church into the

service of their despotism. After that date they were still further

aided by the imperial policy of Charles V., who chose to govern Italy

through subject princes, bound to himself by domestic alliances and

powerful interests. One of these was Cosimo, the first Grand Duke of

Tuscany.

* * * * *

_THE DEBT OF ENGLISH TO ITALIAN LITERATURE_

To an Englishman one of the chief interests of the study of Italian

literature is derived from the fact that, between England and Italy,

an almost uninterrupted current of intellectual intercourse has been

maintained throughout the last five centuries. The English have never,

indeed, at any time been slavish imitators of the Italians; but Italy

has formed the dreamland of the English fancy, inspiring poets with

their most delightful thoughts, supplying them with subjects, and

implanting in their minds that sentiment of Southern beauty which,

engrafted on our more passionately imaginative Northern nature, has

borne rich fruit in the works of Chaucer, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakspere,

Milton, and the poets of this century.

It is not strange that Italy should thus in matters of culture have

been the guide and mistress of England. Italy, of all the European

nations, was the first to produce high art and literature in the dawn

of modern civilisation. Italy was the first to display refinement in

domestic life, polish of manners, civilities of intercourse. In Italy

the commerce of courts first developed a society of men and women,

educated by the same traditions of humanistic culture. In Italy the

principles of government were first discussed and reduced to theory.

In Italy the zeal for the classics took its origin; and scholarship,

to which we owe our mental training, was at first the possession of

none almost but Italians. It therefore followed that during the age of

the Renaissance any man of taste or genius, who desired to share the

newly discovered privileges of learning, had to seek Italy. Every one

who wished to be initiated into the secrets of science or philosophy,

had to converse with Italians in person or through books. Every one

who was eager to polish his native language, and to render it the

proper vehicle of poetic thought, had to consult the masterpieces of

Italian literature. To Italians the courtier, the diplomatist, the

artist, the student of statecraft and of military tactics, the

political theorist, the merchant, the man of laws, the man of arms,

and the churchman turned for precedents and precepts. The nations of

the North, still torpid and somnolent in their semi-barbarism, needed

the magnetic touch of Italy before they could awake to intellectual

life. Nor was this all. Long before the thirst for culture possessed

the English mind, Italy had appropriated and assimilated all that

Latin literature contained of strong or splendid to arouse the thought

and fancy of the modern world; Greek, too, was rapidly becoming the

possession of the scholars of Florence and Rome; so that English men

of letters found the spirit of the ancients infused into a modern

literature; models of correct and elegant composition existed for them

in a language easy, harmonious, and not dissimilar in usage to their

own.

The importance of this service, rendered by Italians to the rest of

Europe, cannot be exaggerated. By exploring, digesting, and

reproducing the classics, Italy made the labour of scholarship

comparatively light for the Northern nations, and extended to us the

privilege of culture without the peril of losing originality in the

enthusiasm for erudition. Our great poets could handle lightly, and

yet profitably, those masterpieces of Greece and Rome, beneath the

weight of which, when first discovered, the genius of the Italians had

wavered. To the originality of Shakspere an accession of wealth

without weakness was brought by the perusal of Italian works, in which

the spirit of the antique was seen as in a modern mirror. Then, in

addition to this benefit of instruction, Italy gave to England a gift

of pure beauty, the influence of which, in refining our national

taste, harmonising the roughness of our manners and our language, and

stimulating our imagination, has been incalculable. It was a not

unfrequent custom for young men of ability to study at the Italian

universities, or at least to undertake a journey to the principal

Italian cities. From their sojourn in that land of loveliness and

intellectual life they returned with their Northern brains most

powerfully stimulated. To produce, by masterpieces of the imagination,

some work of style that should remain as a memento of that glorious

country, and should vie on English soil with the art of Italy, was

their generous ambition. Consequently the substance of the stories

versified by our poets, the forms of our metres, and the cadences of

our prose periods reveal a close attention to Italian originals.

This debt of England to Italy in the matter of our literature began

with Chaucer. Truly original and national as was the framework of the

'Canterbury Tales,' we can hardly doubt but that Chaucer was

determined in the form adopted for his poem by the example of

Boccaccio. The subject-matter, also, of many of his tales was taken

from Boccaccio's prose or verse. For example, the story of Patient

Grizzel is founded upon one of the legends of the 'Decameron,' while

the Knight's Tale is almost translated from the 'Teseide' of

Boccaccio, and Troilus and Creseide is derived from the 'Filostrato'

of the same author. The Franklin's Tale and the Reeve's Tale

are also based either on stories of Boccaccio or else on French

'Fabliaux,' to which Chaucer, as well as Boccaccio, had access. I do

not wish to lay too much stress upon Chaucer's direct obligations to

Boccaccio, because it is incontestable that the French 'Fabliaux,'

which supplied them both with subjects, were the common property of

the mediæval nations. But his indirect debt in all that concerns

elegant handling of material, and in the fusion of the romantic with

the classic spirit, which forms the chief charm of such tales as the

Palamon and Arcite, can hardly be exaggerated. Lastly, the seven-lined

stanza, called _rime royal_, which Chaucer used with so much effect in

narrative poetry, was probably borrowed from the earlier Florentine

'Ballata,' the last line rhyming with its predecessor being

substituted for the recurrent refrain. Indeed, the stanza itself, as

used by our earliest poets, may be found in Guido Cavalcanti's

'Ballatetta,' beginning, _Posso degli occhi miei_.

Between Chaucer and Surrey the Muse of England fell asleep; but when

in the latter half of the reign of Henry VIII. she awoke again, it was

as a conscious pupil of the Italian that she attempted new strains and

essayed fresh metres. 'In the latter end of Henry VIII.'s reign,' says

Puttenham, 'sprang up a new company of courtly makers, of whom Sir T.

Wyatt the elder, and Henry Earl of Surrey, were the two chieftains,

who, having travelled into Italy, and there tasted the sweet and

stately measures and style of the Italian poesy, as novices newly

crept out of the schools of Dante, Ariosto, and Petrarch, they greatly

polished our rude and homely manner of vulgar poesy, from that it had

been before, and for that cause may justly be said the first reformers

of our English metre and style.' The chief point in which Surrey

imitated his 'master, Francis Petrarcha,' was in the use of the

sonnet. He introduced this elaborate form of poetry into our

literature; and how it has thriven with us, the masterpieces of

Spenser, Shakspere, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Rossetti attest. As

practised by Dante and Petrarch, the sonnet is a poem of fourteen

lines, divided into two quatrains and two triplets, so arranged that

the two quatrains repeat one pair of rhymes, while the two triplets

repeat another pair. Thus an Italian sonnet of the strictest form is

composed upon four rhymes, interlaced with great art. But much

divergence from this rigid scheme of rhyming was admitted even by

Petrarch, who not unfrequently divided the six final lines of the

sonnet into three couplets, interwoven in such a way that the two last

lines never rhymed.[17]

It has been necessary to say thus much about the structure of the

Italian sonnet, in order to make clear the task which lay before

Surrey and Wyatt, when they sought to transplant it into English.

Surrey did not adhere to the strict fashion of Petrarch: his sonnets

consist either of three regular quatrains concluded with a couplet,

or else of twelve lines rhyming alternately and concluded with a

couplet. Wyatt attempted to follow the order and interlacement of the

Italian rhymes more closely, but he too concluded his sonnet with a

couplet. This introduction of the final couplet was a violation of the

Italian rule, which may be fairly considered as prejudicial to the

harmony of the whole structure, and which has insensibly caused the

English sonnet to terminate in an epigram. The famous sonnet of Surrey

on his love, Geraldine, is an excellent example of the metrical

structure as adapted to the supposed necessities of English rhyming,

and as afterwards adhered to by Shakspere in his long series of

love-poems. Surrey, while adopting the form of the sonnet, kept quite

clear of the Petrarchist's mannerism. His language is simple and

direct: there is no subtilising upon far-fetched conceits, no

wire-drawing of exquisite sentimentalism, although he celebrates in

this, as in his other sonnets, a lady for whom he appears to have

entertained no more than a Platonic or imaginary passion. Surrey was a

great experimentalist in metre. Besides the sonnet, he introduced into

England blank verse, which he borrowed from the Italian _versi

sciolti_, fixing that decasyllable iambic rhythm for English

versification in which our greatest poetical triumphs have been

achieved.

Before quitting the subject of the sonnet it would, however, be well

to mention the changes which were wrought in its structure by early

poets desirous of emulating the Italians. Shakspere, as already

hinted, adhered to the simple form introduced by Surrey: his stanzas

invariably consist of three separate quatrains followed by a couplet.

But Sir Philip Sidney, whose familiarity with Italian literature was

intimate, and who had resided long in Italy, perceived that without a

greater complexity and interweaving of rhymes the beauty of the poem

was considerably impaired. He therefore combined the rhymes of the two

quatrains, as the Italians had done, leaving himself free to follow

the Italian fashion in the conclusion, or else to wind up after

English usage with a couplet. Spenser and Drummond follow the rule of

Sidney; Drayton and Daniel, that of Surrey and Shakspere. It was not

until Milton that an English poet preserved the form of the Italian

sonnet in its strictness; but, after Milton, the greatest

sonnet-writers--Wordsworth, Keats, and Rossetti--have aimed at

producing stanzas as regular as those of Petrarch.

The great age of our literature--the age of Elizabeth--was essentially

one of Italian influence. In Italy the Renaissance had reached its

height: England, feeling the new life which had been infused into arts

and letters, turned instinctively to Italy, and adopted her canons of

taste. 'Euphues' has a distinct connection with the Italian discourses

of polite culture. Sidney's 'Arcadia' is a copy of what Boccaccio had

attempted in his classical romances, and Sanazzaro in his

pastorals.[18] Spenser approached the subject of the 'Faery Queen'

with his head full of Ariosto and the romantic poets of Italy. His

sonnets are Italian; his odes embody the Platonic philosophy of the

Italians.[19] The extent of Spenser's deference to the Italians in

matters of poetic art may be gathered from this passage in the

dedication to Sir Walter Raleigh of the 'Faery Queen:'

I have followed all the antique poets historical: first

Homer, who in the persons of Agamemnon and Ulysses hath

ensampled a good governor and a virtuous man, the one in his

Ilias, the other in his Odysseis; then Virgil, whose like

intention was to do in the person of Æneas; after him

Ariosto comprised them both in his Orlando; and lately Tasso

dissevered them again, and formed both parts in two persons,

namely, that part which they in Philosophy call Ethice, or

virtues of a private man, coloured in his Rinaldo, the other

named Politico in his Goffredo.

From this it is clear that, to the mind of Spenser, both Ariosto and

Tasso were authorities of hardly less gravity than Homer and Virgil.

Raleigh, in the splendid sonnet with which he responds to this

dedication, enhances the fame of Spenser by affecting to believe that

the great Italian, Petrarch, will be jealous of him in the grave. To

such an extent were the thoughts of the English poets occupied with

their Italian masters in the art of song.

It was at this time, again, that English literature was enriched by

translations of Ariosto and Tasso--the one from the pen of Sir John

Harrington, the other from that of Fairfax. Both were produced in the

metre of the original--the octave stanza, which, however, did not at

that period take root in England. At the same period the works of many

of the Italian novelists, especially Bandello and Cinthio and

Boccaccio, were translated into English; Painter's 'Palace of

Pleasure' being a treasure-house of Italian works of fiction. Thomas

Hoby translated Castiglione's 'Courtier' in 1561. As a proof of the

extent to which Italian books were read in England at the end of the

sixteenth century, we may take a stray sentence from a letter of

Harvey, in which he disparages the works of Robert Greene:--'Even

Guicciardine's silver histories and Ariosto's golden cantos grow out

of request: and the Countess of Pembroke's "Arcadia" is not green

enough for queasy stomachs; but they must have seen Greene's

"Arcadia," and I believe most eagerly longed for Greene's "Faery

Queen."'

Still more may be gathered on the same topic from the indignant

protest uttered by Roger Ascham in his 'Schoolmaster' (pp. 78-91, date

1570) against the prevalence of Italian customs, the habit of Italian

travel, and the reading of Italian books translated into English.

Selections of Italian stories rendered into English were extremely

popular; and Greene's tales, which had such vogue that Nash says of

them, 'glad was that printer that might be so blest to pay him dear

for the very dregs of his wit,' were all modelled on the Italian. The

education of a young man of good family was not thought complete

unless he had spent some time in Italy, studied its literature,

admired its arts, and caught at least some tincture of its manners.

Our rude ancestors brought back with them from these journeys many

Southern vices, together with the culture they had gone to seek. The

contrast between the plain dealing of the North and the refined

Machiavellism of the South, between Protestant earnestness in religion

and Popish scepticism, between the homely virtues of England and the

courtly libertinism of Venice or Florence, blunted the moral sense,

while it stimulated the intellectual activity of the English

travellers, and too often communicated a fatal shock to their

principles. _Inglese Italianato è un diavolo incarnato_ passed into a

proverb: we find it on the lips of Parker, of Howell, of Sidney, of

Greene, and of Ascham; while Italy itself was styled by severe

moralists the court of Circe. In James Howell's 'Instructions for

forreine travell' we find this pregnant sentence: 'And being now in

Italy, that great limbique of working braines, he must be very

circumspect in his carriage, for she is able to turne a Saint into a

devill, and deprave the best natures, if one will abandon himselfe,

and become a prey to dissolut courses and wantonesse.' Italy, in

truth, had already become corrupt, and the fruit of her contact with

the nations of the North was seen in the lives of such scholars as

Robert Greene, who confessed that he returned from his travels

instructed 'in all the villanies under the sun.' Many of the scandals

of the Court of James might be ascribed to this aping of Southern

manners.

Yet, together with the evil of depraved morality, the advantage of

improved culture was imported from Italy into England; and the

constitution of the English genius was young and healthy enough to

purge off the mischief, while it assimilated what was beneficial. This

is very manifest in the history of our drama, which, taking it

altogether, is at the same time the purest and the most varied that

exists in literature; while it may be affirmed without exaggeration

that one of the main impulses to free dramatic composition in England

was communicated by the attraction everything Italian possessed for

the English fancy. It was in the drama that the English displayed the

richness and the splendour of the Renaissance, which had blazed so

gorgeously and at times so balefully below the Alps. The Italy of the

Renaissance fascinated our dramatists with a strange wild glamour--the

contrast of external pageant and internal tragedy, the alternations of

radiance and gloom, the terrible examples of bloodshed, treason, and

heroism emergent from ghastly crimes. Our drama began with a

translation of Ariosto's 'Suppositi' and ended with Davenant's 'Just

Italian.' In the very dawn of tragic composition Greene versified a

portion of the 'Orlando Furioso,' and Marlowe devoted one of his most

brilliant studies to the villanies of a Maltese Jew. Of Shakspere's

plays five are incontestably Italian: several of the rest are

furnished with Italian names to suit the popular taste. Ben Jonson

laid the scene of his most subtle comedy of manners, 'Volpone,' in

Venice, and sketched the first cast of 'Every Man in his Humour' for

Italian characters. Tourneur, Ford, and Webster were so dazzled by the

tragic lustre of the wickedness of Italy that their finest dramas,

without exception, are minute and carefully studied psychological

analyses of great Italian tales of crime. The same, in a less degree,

is true of Middleton and Dekker. Massinger makes a story of the Sforza

family the subject of one of his best plays. Beaumont and Fletcher

draw the subjects of comedies and tragedies alike from the Italian

novelists. Fletcher in his 'Faithful Shepherdess' transfers the

pastoral style of Tasso and Guarini to the North. So close is the

connection between our tragedy and Italian novels that Marston and

Ford think fit to introduce passages of Italian dialogue into the

plays of 'Giovanni and Annabella' and 'Antonio and Mellida.' But the

best proof of the extent to which Italian life and literature had

influenced our dramatists, may be easily obtained by taking down

Halliwell's 'Dictionary of Old Plays,' and noticing that about every

third drama has an Italian title. Meanwhile the poems composed by the

chief dramatists--Shakspere's 'Venus and Adonis,' Marlowe's 'Hero and

Leander,' Marston's 'Pygmalion,' and Beaumont's 'Hermaphrodite'--are

all of them conceived in the Italian style, by men who had either

studied Southern literature, or had submitted to its powerful æsthetic

influences. The Masques, moreover, of Jonson, of Lyly, of Fletcher,

and of Chapman are exact reproductions upon the English court theatres

of such festival pageants as were presented to the Medici at Florence

or to the Este family at Ferrara.[20] Throughout our drama the

influence of Italy, direct or indirect, either as supplying our

playwrights with subjects or as stimulating their imagination, may

thus be traced. Yet the Elizabethan drama is in the highest sense

original. As a work of art pregnant with deepest wisdom, and

splendidly illustrative of the age which gave it birth, it far

transcends anything that Italy produced in the same department. Our

poets have a more masculine judgment, more fiery fancy, nobler

sentiment, than the Italians of any age but that of Dante. What Italy

gave, was the impulse toward creation, not patterns to be

imitated--the excitement of the imagination by a spectacle of so much

grandeur, not rules and precepts for production--the keen sense of

tragic beauty, not any tradition of accomplished art.

The Elizabethan period of our literature was, in fact, the period

during which we derived most from the Italian nation.

The study of the Italian language went hand in hand with the study of

Greek and Latin, so that the three together contributed to form the

English taste. Between us and the ancient world stood the genius of

Italy as an interpreter. Nor was this connection broken until far on

into the reign of Charles II. What Milton owed to Italy is clear not

only from his Italian sonnets, but also from the frequent mention of

Dante and Petrarch in his prose works, from his allusions to Boiardo

and Ariosto in the 'Paradise Lost,' and from the hints which he

probably derived from Pulci, Tasso and Andreini. It would, indeed, be

easy throughout his works to trace a continuous vein of Italian

influence in detail. But, more than this, Milton's poetical taste in

general seems to have been formed and ripened by familiarity with the

harmonies of the Italian language. In his Tractate on Education

addressed to Mr. Hartlib, he recommends that boys should be instructed

in the Italian pronunciation of vowel sounds, in order to give

sonorousness and dignity to elocution. This slight indication supplies

us with a key to the method of melodious structure employed by Milton

in his blank verse. Those who have carefully studied the harmonies of

the 'Paradise Lost,' know how all-important are the assonances of the

vowel sounds of _o_ and _a_ in its most musical passages. It is just

this attention to the liquid and sonorous recurrences of open vowels

that we should expect from a poet who proposed to assimilate his

diction to that of the Italians.

After the age of Milton the connection between Italy and England is

interrupted. In the seventeenth century Italy herself had sunk into

comparative stupor, and her literature was trivial. France not only

swayed the political destinies of Europe, but also took the lead in

intellectual culture. Consequently, our poets turned from Italy to

France, and the French spirit pervaded English literature throughout

the period of the Restoration and the reigns of William and Queen Anne.

Yet during this prolonged reaction against the earlier movement of

English literature, as manifested in Elizabethanism, the influence of

Italy was not wholly extinct. Dryden's 'Tales from Boccaccio' are no

insignificant contribution to our poetry, and his 'Palamon and

Arcite,' through Chaucer, returns to the same source. But when, at the

beginning of this century, the Elizabethan tradition was revived, then

the Italian influence reappeared more vigorous than ever. The metre of

'Don Juan,' first practised by Frere and then adopted by Lord Byron,

is Pulci's octave stanza; the manner is that of Berni, Folengo, and

the Abbé Casti, fused and heightened by the brilliance of Byron's

genius into a new form. The subject of Shelley's strongest work of art

is Beatrice Cenci. Rogers's poem is styled 'Italy.' Byron's dramas are

chiefly Italian. Leigh Hunt repeats the tale of Francesca da Rimini.

Keats versifies Boccaccio's 'Isabella.' Passing to contemporary poets,

Rossetti has acclimatised in English the metres and the manner of the

earliest Italian lyrists. Swinburne dedicates his noblest song to the

spirit of liberty in Italy. Even George Eliot and Tennyson have each

of them turned stories of Boccaccio into verse. The best of Mrs.

Browning's poems, 'Casa Guidi Windows' and 'Aurora Leigh,' are steeped

in Italian thought and Italian imagery. Browning's longest poem is a

tale of Italian crime; his finest studies in the 'Men and Women' are

portraits of Italian character of the Renaissance period. But there is

more than any mere enumeration of poets and their work can set forth,

in the connection between Italy and England. That connection, so far

as the poetical imagination is concerned, is vital. As poets in the

truest sense of the word, we English live and breathe through sympathy

with the Italians. The magnetic touch which is required to inflame the

imagination of the North, is derived from Italy. The nightingales of

English song who make our oak and beech copses resonant in spring with

purest melody, are migratory birds, who have charged their souls in

the South with the spirit of beauty, and who return to warble native

wood-notes in a tongue which is their own.

What has hitherto been said about the debt of the English poets to

Italy, may seem to imply that our literature can be regarded as to

some extent a parasite on that of the Italians. Against such a

conclusion no protest too energetic could be uttered. What we have

derived directly from the Italian poets are, first, some

metres--especially the sonnet and the octave stanza, though the latter

has never taken firm root in England. 'Terza rima,' attempted by

Shelley, Byron, Morris, and Mrs. Browning, has not yet become

acclimatised. Blank verse, although originally remodelled by Surrey

upon the _versi sciolti_ of the Italians, has departed widely from

Italian precedent, first by its decasyllabic structure, whereas

Italian verse consists of hendecasyllables; and, secondly, by its

greater force, plasticity, and freedom. The Spenserian stanza, again,

is a new and original metre peculiar to our literature; though it is

possible that but for the complex structures of Italian lyric verse,

it might not have been fashioned for the 'Faery Queen.' Lastly, the

so-called heroic couplet is native to England; at any rate, it is in

no way related to Italian metre. Therefore the only true Italian

exotic adopted without modification into our literature is the sonnet.

In the next place, we owe to the Italians the subject-matter of many

of our most famous dramas and our most delightful tales in verse. But

the English treatment of these histories and fables has been uniformly

independent and original. Comparing Shakspere's 'Romeo and Juliet'

with Bandello's tale, Webster's 'Duchess of Malfy' with the version

given from the Italian in Painter's 'Palace of Pleasure,' and

Chaucer's Knight's Tale with the 'Teseide' of Boccaccio, we perceive

at once that the English poets have used their Italian models merely

as outlines to be filled in with freedom, as the canvas to be

embroidered with a tapestry of vivid groups. Nothing is more manifest

than the superiority of the English genius over the Italian in all

dramatic qualities of intense passion, profound analysis, and living

portrayal of character in action. The mere rough detail of Shakspere's

'Othello' is to be found in Cinthio's Collection of Novelle; but let

an unprejudiced reader peruse the original, and he will be no more

deeply affected by it than by any touching story of treachery,

jealousy, and hapless innocence. The wily subtleties of Iago, the

soldierly frankness of Cassio, the turbulent and volcanic passions of

Othello, the charm of Desdemona, and the whole tissue of vivid

incidents which make 'Othello' one of the most tremendous extant

tragedies of characters in combat, are Shakspere's, and only

Shakspere's. This instance, indeed, enables us exactly to indicate

what the English owed to Italy and what was essentially their own.

From that Southern land of Circe about which they dreamed, and which

now and then they visited, came to their imaginations a

spirit-stirring breath of inspiration. It was to them the country of

marvels, of mysterious crimes, of luxurious gardens and splendid

skies, where love was more passionate and life more picturesque, and

hate more bloody and treachery more black, than in our Northern

climes. Italy was a spacious grove of wizardry, which mighty poets, on

the quest of fanciful adventure, trod with fascinated senses and

quickened pulses. But the strong brain which converted what they heard

and read and saw of that charmed land into the stuff of golden romance

or sable tragedy, was their own.

English literature has been defined a literature of genius.

Our greatest work in art has been achieved not so much by inspiration,

subordinate to sentiments of exquisite good taste or guided by

observance of classical models, as by audacious sallies of pure

inventive power. This is true as a judgment of that constellation

which we call our drama, of the meteor Byron, of Milton and Dryden,

who are the Jupiter and Mars of our poetic system, and of the stars

which stud our literary firmament under the names of Shelley, Keats,

Wordsworth, Chatterton, Scott, Coleridge, Clough, Blake, Browning,

Swinburne, Tennyson. There are only a very few of the English poets,

Pope and Gray, for example, in whom the free instincts of genius are

kept systematically in check by the laws of the reflective

understanding. Now Italian literature is in this respect all unlike

our own. It began, indeed, with Dante, as a literature pre-eminently

of genius; but the spirit of scholarship assumed the sway as early as

the days of Petrarch and Boccaccio, and after them Italian has been

consistently a literature of taste. By this I mean that even the

greatest Italian poets have sought to render their style correct, have

endeavoured to subordinate their inspiration to what they considered

the rules of sound criticism, and have paid serious attention to their

manner as independent of the matter they wished to express. The

passion for antiquity, so early developed in Italy, delivered the

later Italian poets bound hand and foot into the hands of Horace.

Poliziano was content to reproduce the classic authors in a mosaic

work of exquisite translations. Tasso was essentially a man of talent,

producing work of chastened beauty by diligent attention to the rule

and method of his art. Even Ariosto submitted the liberty of his swift

spirit to canons of prescribed elegance. While our English poets have

conceived and executed without regard for the opinion of the learned

and without obedience to the usages of language--Shakspere, for

example, producing tragedies which set Aristotle at defiance, and

Milton engrafting Latinisms on the native idiom--the Italian poets

thought and wrote with the fear of Academies before their eyes, and

studied before all things to maintain the purity of the Tuscan tongue.

The consequence is that the Italian and English literatures are

eminent for very different excellences. All that is forcible in the

dramatic presentation of life and character and action, all that is

audacious in imagination and capricious in fancy, whatever strength

style can gain from the sallies of original and untrammelled

eloquence, whatever beauty is derived from spontaneity and native

grace, belong in abundant richness to the English. On the other hand,

the Italian poets present us with masterpieces of correct and studied

diction, with carefully elaborated machinery, and with a style

maintained at a uniform level of dignified correctness. The weakness

of the English proceeds from inequality and extravagance; it is the

weakness of self-confident vigour, intolerant of rule, rejoicing in

its own exuberant resources. The weakness of the Italian is due to

timidity and moderation; it is the weakness that springs not so much

from a lack of native strength as from the over-anxious expenditure of

strength upon the attainment of finish, polish, and correctness. Hence

the two nations have everything to learn from one another. Modern

Italian poets may seek by contact with Shakspere and Milton to gain a

freedom from the trammels imposed upon them by the slavish followers

of Petrarch; while the attentive perusal of Tasso should be

recommended to all English people who have no ready access to the

masterpieces of Greek and Latin literature.

Another point of view may be gained by noticing the pre-dominant tone

of the two literatures. Whenever English poetry is really great, it

approximates to the tragic and the stately; whereas the Italians are

peculiarly felicitous in the smooth and pleasant style, which combines

pathos with amusement, and which does not trespass beyond the region

of beauty into the domain of sublimity or terror. Italian poetry is

analogous to Italian painting and Italian music: it bathes the soul in

a plenitude of charms, investing even the most solemn subjects with

loveliness. Rembrandt and Albert Dürer depict the tragedies of the

Sacred History with a serious and awful reality: Italian painters,

with a few rare but illustrious exceptions, shrink from approaching

them from any point of view but that of harmonious melancholy. Even so

the English poets stir the soul to its very depths by their profound

and earnest delineations of the stern and bitter truths of the world:

Italian poets environ all things with the golden haze of an artistic

harmony; so that the soul is agitated by no pain at strife with the

persuasions of pure beauty.

* * * * *

_POPULAR SONGS OF TUSCANY_

It is a noticeable fact about the popular songs of Tuscany that they

are almost exclusively devoted to love. The Italians in general have

no ballad literature resembling that of our Border or that of Spain.

The tragic histories of their noble families, the great deeds of their

national heroes, and the sufferings of their country during centuries

of warfare, have left but few traces in their rustic poetry. It is

true that some districts are less utterly barren than others in these

records of the past. The Sicilian people's poetry, for example,

preserves a memory of the famous Vespers; and one or two terrible

stories of domestic tragedy, like the tale of Rosmunda in 'La Donna

Lombarda,' the romance of the Baronessa di Carini, and the so-called

Caso di Sciacca, may still be heard upon the lips of the people. But

these exceptions are insignificant in comparison with the vast mass of

songs which deal with love; and I cannot find that Tuscany, where the

language of this minstrelsy is purest, and where the artistic

instincts of the race are strongest, has anything at all approaching

to our ballads.[21] Though the Tuscan contadini are always singing, it

rarely happens that

The plaintive numbers flow

For old, unhappy, far-off things,

And battles long ago.

On the contrary, we may be sure, when we hear their voices ringing

through the olive-groves or macchi, that they are chanting

Some more humble lay,

Familiar matter of to-day,--

Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,

That has been, and may be again;

or else, since their melodies are by no means uniformly sad, some

ditty of the joyousness of springtime or the ecstasy of love.

This defect of anything corresponding to our ballads of 'Chevy Chase,'

or 'Sir Patrick Spens,' or 'Gil Morrice,' in a poetry which is still

so vital with the life of past centuries, is all the more remarkable

because Italian history is distinguished above that of other nations

by tragic episodes peculiarly suited to poetic treatment. Many of

these received commemoration in the fourteenth century from Dante;

others were embodied in the _novelle_ of Boccaccio and Cinthio and

Bandello, whence they passed into the dramas of Shakspere, Webster,

Ford, and their contemporaries. But scarcely an echo can be traced

through all the volumes of the recently collected popular songs. We

must seek for an explanation of this fact partly in the conditions of

Italian life, and partly in the nature of the Italian imagination.

Nowhere in Italy do we observe that intimate connection between the

people at large and the great nobles which generates the sympathy of

clanship. Politics in most parts of the peninsula fell at a very

early period into the hands either of irresponsible princes, who ruled

like despots, or else of burghers, who administered the state within

the walls of their Palazzo Pubblico. The people remained passive

spectators of contemporary history. The loyalty of subjects to their

sovereign which animates the Spanish ballads, the loyalty of retainers

to their chief which gives life to the tragic ballads of the Border,

did not exist in Italy. Country-folk felt no interest in the doings of

Visconti or Medici or Malatesti sufficient to arouse the enthusiasm of

local bards or to call forth the celebration of their princely

tragedies in verse. Amid the miseries of foreign wars and home

oppression, it seemed better to demand from verse and song some

mitigation of the woes of life, some expression of personal emotion,

than to record the disasters which to us at a distance appear poetic

in their grandeur.

These conditions of popular life, although unfavourable to the

production of ballad poetry, would not, however, have been sufficient

by themselves to check its growth, if the Italians had been strongly

impelled to literature of this type by their nature. The real reason

why their _Volkslieder_ are amorous and personal is to be found in the

quality of their imagination. The Italian genius is not creatively

imaginative in the highest sense. The Italians have never, either in

the ancient or the modern age, produced a great drama or a national

epic, the 'Æneid' and the 'Divine Comedy' being obviously of different

species from the 'Iliad' or the 'Nibelungen Lied.' Modern Italians,

again, are distinguished from the French, the Germans, and the English

in being the conscious inheritors of an older, august, and strictly

classical civilisation. The great memories of Rome weigh down their

faculties of invention. It would also seem as though they shrank in

their poetry from the representation of what is tragic and

spirit-stirring. They incline to what is cheerful, brilliant, or

pathetic. The dramatic element in human life, external to the

personality of the poet, which exercised so strong a fascination over

our ballad-bards and playwrights, has but little attraction for the

Italian. When he sings, he seeks to express his own individual

emotions--his love, his joy, his jealousy, his anger, his despair. The

language which he uses is at the same time direct in its intensity,

and hyperbolical in its display of fancy; but it lacks those

imaginative touches which exalt the poetry of personal passion into a

sublimer region. Again, the Italians are deficient in a sense of the

supernatural. The wraiths that cannot rest because their love is still

unsatisfied, the voices which cry by night over field and fell, the

water-spirits and forest fairies, the second-sight of coming woes, the

presentiment of death, the warnings and the charms and spells, which

fill the popular poetry of all Northern nations, are absent in Italian

songs. In the whole of Tigri's collection I only remember one mention

of a ghost. It is not that the Italians are deficient in superstitions

of all kinds. Every one has heard of their belief in the evil eye, for

instance. But they do not connect this kind of fetichism with their

poetry; and even their greatest poets, with the exception of Dante,

have shown no capacity or no inclination for enhancing the imaginative

effect of their creations by an appeal to the instinct of mysterious

awe.

The truth is that the Italians as a race are distinguished as much by

a firm grasp upon the practical realities of existence as by powerful

emotions. They have but little of that dreamy _Schwärmerei_ with which

the people of the North are largely gifted. The true sphere of their

genius is painting. What appeals to the imagination through the eyes,

they have expressed far better than any other modern nation. But

their poetry, like their music, is deficient in tragic sublimity and

in the higher qualities of imaginative creation.

It may seem paradoxical to say this of the nation which produced

Dante. But we must remember not to judge races by single and

exceptional men of genius. Petrarch, the Troubadour of exquisite

emotions, Boccaccio, who touches all the keys of life so lightly,

Ariosto, with the smile of everlasting April on his lips, and Tasso,

excellent alone when he confines himself to pathos or the picturesque,

are no exceptions to what I have just said. Yet these poets pursued

their art with conscious purpose. The tragic splendour of Greece, the

majesty of Rome, were not unknown to them. Far more is it true that

popular poetry in Italy, proceeding from the hearts of uncultivated

peasants and expressing the national character in its simplicity,

displays none of the stuff from which the greatest works of art in

verse, epics and dramas, can be wrought. But within its own sphere of

personal emotion, this popular poetry is exquisitely melodious,

inexhaustibly rich, unique in modern literature for the direct

expression which it has given to every shade of passion.

Signor Tigri's collection,[22] to which I shall confine my attention

in this paper, consists of eleven hundred and eighty-five _rispetti_,

with the addition of four hundred and sixty-one _stornelli_. Rispetto,

it may be said in passing, is the name commonly given throughout Italy

to short poems, varying from six to twelve lines, constructed on the

principle of the octave stanza. That is to say, the first part of the

rispetto consists of four or six lines with alternate rhymes, while

one or more couplets, called the _ripresa_, complete the poem.[23]

The stornello, or ritournelle, never exceeds three lines, and owes

its name to the return which it makes at the end of the last line to

the rhyme given by the emphatic word of the first. Browning, in his

poem of 'Fra Lippo Lippi,' has accustomed English ears to one common

species of the stornello,[24] which sets out with the name of a

flower, and rhymes with it, as thus:

Fior di narciso.

Prigionero d'amore mi son reso,

Nel rimirare il tuo leggiadro viso.

The divisions of those two sorts of songs, to which Tigri gives names

like The Beauty of Women, The Beauty of Men, Falling in Love,

Serenades, Happy Love, Unhappy Love, Parting, Absence, Letters, Return

to Home, Anger and Jealousy, Promises, Entreaties and Reproaches,

Indifference, Treachery and Abandonment, prove with what fulness the

various phases of the tender passion are treated. Through the whole

fifteen hundred the one theme of Love is never relinquished. Only two

persons, 'I' and 'thou,' appear upon the scene; yet so fresh and so

various are the moods of feeling, that one can read them from first to

last without too much satiety.

To seek for the authors of these ditties would be useless. Some of

them may be as old as the fourteenth century; others may have been

made yesterday. Some are the native product of the Tuscan mountain

villages, especially of the regions round Pistoja and Siena, where on

the spurs of the Apennines the purest Italian is vernacular. Some,

again, are importations from other provinces, especially from Sicily

and Naples, caught up by the peasants of Tuscany and adapted to their

taste and style; for nothing travels faster than a _Volkslied_. Born

some morning in a noisy street of Naples, or on the solitary slopes of

Radicofani, before the week is out, a hundred voices are repeating it.

Waggoners and pedlars carry it across the hills to distant towns. It

floats with the fishermen from bay to bay, and marches with the

conscript to his barrack in a far-off province. Who was the first to

give it shape and form? No one asks, and no one cares. A student well

acquainted with the habits of the people in these matters says, 'If

they knew the author of a ditty, they would not learn it, far less if

they discovered that it was a scholar's.' If the cadence takes their

ear, they consecrate the song at once by placing it upon the honoured

list of 'ancient lays.' Passing from lip to lip and from district to

district, it receives additions and alterations, and becomes the

property of a score of provinces. Meanwhile the poet from whose soul

it blossomed that first morning like a flower, remains contented with

obscurity. The wind has carried from his lips the thistledown of song,

and sown it on a hundred hills and meadows, far and wide. After such

wise is the birth of all truly popular compositions. Who knows, for

instance, the veritable author of many of those mighty German chorals

which sprang into being at the period of the Reformation? The first

inspiration was given, probably, to a single mind; but the melody, as

it has reached us, is the product of a thousand. This accounts for the

variations which in different dialects and districts the same song

presents. Meanwhile, it is sometimes possible to trace the authorship

of a ballad with marked local character to an improvisatore famous in

his village, or to one of those professional rhymesters whom the

country-folk employ in the composition of love-letters to their

sweethearts at a distance.[25] Tommaseo, in the preface to his 'Canti

Popolari,' mentions in particular a Beatrice di Pian degli Ontani,

whose poetry was famous through the mountains of Pistoja; and Tigri

records by name a little girl called Cherubina, who made rispetti by

the dozen as she watched her sheep upon the hills. One of the songs in

his collection (p. 181) contains a direct reference to the village

letter-writer:--

Salutatemi, bella, lo scrivano;

Non lo conosco e non so chi si sia.

A me mi pare un poeta sovrano,

Tanto gli è sperto nella poesia.[26]

While I am writing thus about the production and dissemination of

these love-songs, I cannot help remembering three days and nights

which I once spent at sea between Genoa and Palermo, in the company of

some conscripts who were going to join their regiment in Sicily. They

were lads from the Milanese and Liguria, and they spent a great

portion of their time in composing and singing poetry. One of them had

a fine baritone voice; and when the sun had set, his comrades gathered

round him and begged him to sing to them 'Con quella patetica tua

voce.' Then followed hours of singing, the low monotonous melodies of

his ditties harmonising wonderfully with the tranquillity of night, so

clear and calm that the sky and all its stars were mirrored on the

sea, through which we moved as if in a dream. Sometimes the songs

provoked conversation, which, as is usual in Italy, turned mostly upon

'le bellezze delle donne.' I remember that once an animated discussion

about the relative merits of blondes and brunettes nearly ended in a

quarrel, when the youngest of the whole band, a boy of about

seventeen, put a stop to the dispute by theatrically raising his eyes

and arms to heaven and crying, 'Tu sei innamorato d' una grande Diana

cacciatrice nera, ed io d' una bella Venere bionda.' Though they were

but village lads, they supported their several opinions with arguments

not unworthy of Firenzuola, and showed the greatest delicacy of

feeling in the treatment of a subject which could scarcely have failed

to reveal any latent coarseness.

The purity of all the Italian love-songs collected by Tigri is very

remarkable.[27] Although the passion expressed in them is Oriental in

its vehemence, not a word falls which could offend a virgin's ear. The

one desire of lovers is lifelong union in marriage. The _damo_--for so

a sweetheart is termed in Tuscany--trembles until he has gained the

approval of his future mother-in-law, and forbids the girl he is

courting to leave her house to talk to him at night:--

Dice che tu tì affacci alia finestra;

Ma non tì dice che tu vada fuora,

Perchè, la notte, è cosa disonesta.

All the language of his love is respectful. _Signore_, or master of my

soul, _madonna, anima mia, dolce mio ben, nobil persona,_ are the

terms of adoration with which he approaches his mistress. The

elevation of feeling and perfect breeding which Manzoni has so well

delineated in the loves of Renzo and Lucia are traditional among

Italian country-folk. They are conscious that true gentleness is no

matter of birth or fortune:--

E tu non mi lasciar per poverezza,

Chè povertà non guasta gentilezza.[28]

This in itself constitutes an important element of culture, and

explains to some extent the high romantic qualities of their

impassioned poetry. The beauty of their land reveals still more. 'O

fortunatos nimium sua si bona norint!' Virgil's exclamation is as true

now as it was when he sang the labours of Italian country-folk some

nineteen centuries ago. To a traveller from the north there is a

pathos even in the contrast between the country in which these

children of a happier climate toil, and those bleak, winter-beaten

fields where our own peasants pass their lives. The cold nights and

warm days of Tuscan springtime are like a Swiss summer. They make rich

pasture and a hardy race of men. Tracts of corn and oats and rye

alternate with patches of flax in full flower, with meadows yellow

with buttercups or pink with ragged robin; the young vines, running

from bough to bough of elm and mulberry, are just coming into leaf.

The poplars are fresh with bright green foliage. On the verge of this

blooming plain stand ancient cities ringed with hills, some rising to

snowy Apennines, some covered with white convents and sparkling with

villas. Cypresses shoot, black and spirelike, amid grey clouds of

olive-boughs upon the slopes; and above, where vegetation borders on

the barren rock, are masses of ilex and arbutus interspersed with

chestnut-trees not yet in leaf. Men and women are everywhere at work,

ploughing with great white oxen, or tilling the soil with spades six

feet in length--Sabellian ligones. The songs of nightingales among

acacia-trees, and the sharp scream of swallows wheeling in air, mingle

with the monotonous chant that always rises from the country-people at

their toil. Here and there on points of vantage, where the hill-slopes

sink into the plain, cluster white villages with flower-like

campanili. It is there that the veglia, or evening rendezvous of

lovers, the serenades and balls and feste, of which one hears so much

in the popular minstrelsy, take place. Of course it would not be

difficult to paint the darker shades of this picture. Autumn comes,

when the contadini of Lucca and Siena and Pistoja go forth to work in

the unwholesome marshes of the Maremma, or of Corsica and Sardinia.

Dismal superstitions and hereditary hatreds cast their blight over a

life externally so fair. The bad government of centuries has perverted

in many ways the instincts of a people naturally mild and cheerful and

peace-loving. But as far as nature can make men happy, these

husbandmen are surely to be reckoned fortunate, and in their songs we

find little to remind us of what is otherwise than sunny in their lot.

A translator of these _Volkslieder_ has to contend with difficulties

of no ordinary kind. The freshness of their phrases, the spontaneity

of their sentiments, and the melody of their unstudied cadences, are

inimitable. So again is the peculiar effect of their frequent

transitions from the most fanciful imagery to the language of prose.

No mere student can hope to rival, far less to reproduce, in a foreign

tongue, the charm of verse which sprang untaught from the hearts of

simple folk, which lives unwritten on the lips of lovers, and which

should never be dissociated from singing.[29] There are, besides,

peculiarities in the very structure of the popular rispetto. The

constant repetition of the same phrase with slight variations,

especially in the closing lines of the _ripresa_ of the Tuscan

rispetto, gives an antique force and flavour to these ditties, like

that which we appreciate in our own ballads, but which may easily, in

the translation, degenerate into weakness and insipidity. The Tuscan

rhymester, again, allows himself the utmost licence. It is usual to

find mere assonances like _bene_ and _piacere, oro_ and _volo, ala_

and _alata_, in the place of rhymes; while such remote resemblances of

sound as _colli_ and _poggi_, _lascia_ and _piazza_, are far from

uncommon. To match these rhymes by joining 'home' and 'alone,' 'time'

and 'shine,' &c, would of course be a matter of no difficulty; but it

has seemed to me on the whole best to preserve, with some exceptions,

such accuracy as the English ear requires. I fear, however, that,

after all, these wild-flowers of song, transplanted to another climate

and placed in a hothouse, will appear but pale and hectic by the side

of their robuster brethren of the Tuscan hills.

In the following serenade many of the peculiarities which

I have just noticed occur. I have also adhered to the irregularity of

rhyme which may be usually observed about the middle of the poem (p.

103):--

Sleeping or waking, thou sweet face,

Lift up thy fair and tender brow:

List to thy love in this still place;

He calls thee to thy window now:

But bids thee not the house to quit,

Since in the night this were not meet.

Come to thy window, stay within;

I stand without, and sing and sing:

Come to thy window, stay at home;

I stand without, and make my moan.

Here is a serenade of a more impassioned character (p. 99):--

I come to visit thee, my beauteous queen,

Thee and the house where thou art harboured:

All the long way upon my knees, my queen,