Pisa, 29th April, 1872.
My Friends,
You would pity me, if you knew how seldom I see a newspaper, just now;
but I chanced on one yesterday, and found that all the world was astir
about the marriage of the Marquis of B.; and that the Pope had sent
him, on that occasion, a telegraphic blessing of super-fine quality.
I wonder what the Marquis of B. has done to deserve to be blessed
to that special extent, and whether a little mild beatitude,
sent here to Pisa, might not have been better spent? For, indeed,
before getting hold of the papers, I had been greatly troubled, while
drawing the east end of the Duomo, by three fellows who were leaning
against the Leaning Tower, and expectorating loudly and copiously,
at intervals of half a minute each, over the white marble base of it,
which they evidently conceived to have been constructed only to be
spit upon. They were all in rags, and obviously proposed to remain
in rags all their days, and pass what leisure of life they could
obtain, in spitting. There was a boy with them, in rags also, and
not less expectorant; but having some remains of human activity in
him still, being not more than twelve years old; and he was even a
little interested in my brushes and colours, but rewarded himself,
after the effort of some attention to these, by revolving slowly
round the iron railing in front of me like a pensive squirrel. This
operation at last disturbed me so much, that I asked him if there
were no other railings in Pisa he could turn upside down over, but
these? "Sono cascato, Signor--" "I tumbled over them, please, Sir,"
said he, apologetically, with infinite satisfaction in his black eyes.
Now it seemed to me that these three moist-throated men and the
squirrelline boy stood much more in need of a paternal blessing than
the Marquis of B.--a blessing, of course, with as much of the bloom off
it as would make it consistent with the position in which Providence
had placed them; but enough, in its moderate way, to bring the good out
of them instead of the evil. For there was all manner of good in them,
deep and pure--yet for ever to be dormant; and all manner of evil,
shallow and superficial, yet for ever to be active and practical,
as matters stood that day, under the Leaning Tower.
Lucca, 7th May.--Eight days gone, and I've been working hard, and
looking my carefullest; and seem to have done nothing, nor begun to
see these places, though I've known them thirty years, and though
Mr. Murray's Guide says one may see Lucca, and its Ducal Palace and
Piazza, the Cathedral, the Baptistery, nine churches, and the Roman
amphitheatre, and take a drive round the ramparts, in the time between
the stopping of one train and the starting of the next.
I wonder how much time Mr. Murray would allow for the view I had
to-day, from the tower of the Cathedral, up the valley called of
"Niévole,"--now one tufted softness of fresh springing leaves, far
as the eye can reach. You know something of the produce of the hills
that bound it, and perhaps of its own: at least, one used to see
"Fine Lucca Oil" often enough in the grocers' windows (petroleum has,
I suppose, now taken its place), and the staple of Spitalfields was,
I believe, first woven with Lucca thread.
The actual manner of production of these good things is thus:--The
Val di Niévole is some five miles wide by thirty long, and is
simply one field of corn or rich grass land, undivided by hedges;
the corn two feet high, and more, to-day. Quite Lord Derby's style
of agriculture, you think? No; not quite. Undivided by hedges, the
fields are yet meshed across and across by an intricate network of
posts and chains. The posts are maple-trees, and the chains, garlands
of vine. The meshes of this net each enclose two or three acres of
the corn-land, with a row of mulberry-trees up the middle of it,
for silk. There are poppies, and bright ones too, about the banks and
roadsides; but the corn of Val di Niévole is too proud to grow with
poppies, and is set with wild gladiolus instead, deep violet. Here
and there a mound of crag rises out of the fields, crested with
stone-pine, and studded all over with the large stars of the white
rock-cistus. Quiet streams, filled with close crowds of the golden
waterflag, wind beside meadows painted with purple orchis. On each
side of the great plain is a wilderness of hills, veiled at their feet
with a grey cloud of olive woods; above, sweet with glades of chestnut;
peaks of more distant blue, still, to-day, embroidered with snow, are
rather to be thought of as vast precious stones than mountains, for
all the state of the world's palaces has been hewn out of their marble.
I was looking over all this from under the rim of a large bell,
beautifully embossed, with a St. Sebastian upon it, and some lovely
thin-edged laurel leaves, and an inscription saying that the people
should be filled with the fat of the land, if they listened to the
voice of the Lord. The bell-founder of course meant, by the voice of
the Lord, the sound of his own bell; and all over the plain, one could
see towers rising above the vines voiced in the same manner. Also much
trumpeting and fiddling goes on below, to help the bells, on holy
days; and, assuredly, here is fat enough of land to be filled with,
if listening to these scrapings and tinklings were indeed the way to
be filled.
The laurel leaves on the bell were so finely hammered that I felt
bound to have a ladder set against the lip of it, that I might
examine them more closely; and the sacristan and bell-ringer were
so interested in this proceeding that they got up, themselves,
on the cross-beams, and sat like two jackdaws, looking on, one on
each side; for which expression of sympathy I was deeply grateful,
and offered the bell-ringer, on the spot, two bank-notes for tenpence
each. But they were so rotten with age, and so brittle and black with
tobacco, that, having unadvisedly folded them up small in my purse,
the patches on their backs had run their corners through them, and
they came out tattered like so much tinder. The bell-ringer looked at
them hopelessly, and gave me them back. I promised him some better
patched ones, and folded the remnants of tinder up carefully, to
be kept at Coniston, (where we have still a tenpence-worth or so of
copper,--though no olive oil)--for specimens of the currency of the
new Kingdom of Italy.
Such are the monuments of financial art, attained by a nation which
has lived in the fattest of lands for at least three thousand years,
and for the last twelve hundred of them has had at least some measure
of Christian benediction, with help from bell, book, candle and,
recently, even from gas.
Yet you must not despise the benediction, though it has not provided
them with clean bank-notes. The peasant race, at least, of the Val
di Niévole are not unblest; if honesty, kindness, food sufficient
for them, and peace of heart, can anywise make up for poverty in
current coin. Only the evening before last, I was up among the hills
to the south of Lucca, close to the remains of the country-house of
Castruccio Castracani, who was Lord of the Val di Niévole, and much
good land besides, in the year 1328; (and whose sword, you perhaps
remember, was presented to the King of Sardinia, now King of Italy,
when first he visited the Lucchese after driving out the old Duke
of Tuscany; and Mrs. Browning wrote a poem upon the presentation;)
a Neapolitan Duchess has got his country-house now, and has restored
it to her taste. Well, I was up among the hills, that way, in places
where no English, nor Neapolitans either, ever dream of going, being
altogether lovely and at rest, and the country life in them unchanged;
and I had several friends with me, and among them one of the young
girls who were at Furness Abbey last year; and, scrambling about among
the vines, she lost a pretty little cross of Florentine work. Luckily,
she had made acquaintance, only the day before, with the peasant
mistress of a cottage close by, and with her two youngest children,
Adam and Eve. Eve was still tied up tight in swaddling clothes, down to
the toes, and carried about as a bundle; but Adam was old enough to run
about; and found the cross, and his mother gave it us back next day.
Not unblest, such a people, though with some common human care
and kindness you might bless them a little more. If only you would
not curse them; but the curse of your modern life is fatally near,
and only for a few years more, perhaps, they will be seen--driving
their tawny kine, or with their sheep following them,--to pass,
like pictures in enchanted motion, among their glades of vine.
Rome, 12th May.--I am writing at the window of a new inn, whence I have
a view of a large green gas-lamp, and of a pond, in rustic rock-work,
with four large black ducks in it; also of the top of the Pantheon;
sundry ruined walls; tiled roofs innumerable; and a palace about a
quarter of a mile long, and the height, as near as I can guess, of
Folkestone cliffs under the New Parade; all which I see to advantage
over a balustrade veneered with an inch of marble over four inches of
cheap stone, carried by balusters of cast iron, painted and sanded,
but with the rust coming through,--this being the proper modern
recipe in Italy for balustrades which may meet the increasing demand
of travellers for splendour of abode. (By the way, I see I can get
a pretty little long vignette view of the roof of the Pantheon, and
some neighbouring churches, through a chink between the veneering
and the freestone.)
Standing in this balcony, I am within three hundred yards of the
greater Church of St. Mary, from which Castruccio Castracani walked
to St. Peter's on 17th January, 1328, carrying the sword of the
German Empire, with which he was appointed to gird its Emperor,
on his taking possession of Rome, by Castruccio's help, in spite
of the Pope. The Lord of the Val di Niévole wore a dress of superb
damask silk, doubtless the best that the worms of Lucca mulberry-trees
could spin; and across his breast an embroidered scroll, inscribed,
"He is what God made him," and across his shoulders, behind, another
scroll, inscribed, "And he shall be what God will make."
On the 3rd of August, that same year, he recovered Pistoja from
the Florentines, and rode home to his own Lucca in triumph, being
then the greatest war-captain in Europe, and Lord of Pisa, Pistoja,
Lucca, half the coast of Genoa, and three hundred fortified castles
in the Apennines; on the third of September he lay dead in Lucca,
of fever. "Crushed before the moth;" as the silkworms also, who
were boiled before even they became so much as moths, to make his
embroidered coat for him. And, humanly speaking, because he had worked
too hard in the trenches of Pistoja, in the dog-days, with his armour
on, and with his own hands on the mattock, like the good knight he was.
Nevertheless, his sword was no gift for the King of Italy, if the
Lucchese had thought better of it. For those three hundred castles of
his were all Robber-castles, and he, in fact, only the chief captain
of the three hundred thieves who lived in them. In the beginning
of his career, these "towers of the Lunigiana belonged to gentlemen
who had made brigandage in the mountains, or piracy on the sea, the
sole occupation of their youth. Castruccio united them round him,
and called to his little court all the exiles and adventurers who
were wandering from town to town, in search of war or pleasures." [17]
And, indeed, to Professors of Art, the Apennine between Lucca and
Pistoja is singularly delightful to this day, because of the ruins of
these robber-castles on every mound, and of the pretty monasteries and
arcades of cloister beside them. But how little we usually estimate
the real relation of these picturesque objects! The homes of Baron
and Clerk, side by side, established on the hills. Underneath, in
the plain, the peasant driving his oxen. The Baron lives by robbing
the peasant, and the Clerk by blessing the Baron.
Blessing and absolving, though the Barons of grandest type could
live, and resolutely die, without absolution. Old Straw-Mattress
of Evilstone, [18] at ninety-six, sent his son from beside his
death-mattress to attack the castle of the Bishop of Arezzo, thinking
the Bishop would be off his guard, news having gone abroad that the
grey-haired Knight of Evilstone could sit his horse no more. But,
usually, the absolution was felt to be needful towards the end of
life; and if one thinks of it, the two kinds of edifices on the
hill-tops may be shortly described as those of the Pillager and
Pardoner, or Pardonere, Chaucer's word being classical in spelling,
and the best general one for the clergy of the two great Evangelical
and Papal sects. Only a year or two ago, close to the Crystal Palace,
I heard the Rev. Mr. Tipple announce from his pulpit that there was
no thief, nor devourer of widows' houses, nor any manner of sinner,
in his congregation that day, who might not leave the church an
entirely pardoned and entirely respectable person, if he would only
believe what the Rev. Mr. Tipple was about to announce to him.
Strange, too, how these two great pardoning religions agree in
the accompaniment of physical filth. I have never been hindered
from drawing street subjects by pure human stench, but in two
cities,--Edinburgh and Rome.
There are some things, however, which Edinburgh and London pardon,
now-a-days, which Rome would not. Penitent thieves, by all means,
but not impenitent; still less impenitent peculators.
Have patience a little, for I must tell you one or two things more
about Lucca: they are all connected with the history of Florence,
which is to be one of the five cities you are to be able to give
account of; and, by the way, remember at once, that her florin in the
14th century was of such pure gold that when in Chaucer's "Pardonere's
Tale" Death puts himself into the daintiest dress he can, it is into
a heap of "floreines faire and bright." He has chosen another form
at Lucca; and when I had folded up my two bits of refuse tinder,
I walked into the Cathedral to look at the golden lamp which hangs
before the Sacred Face--twenty-four pounds of pure gold in the lamp:
Face of wood: the oath of kings, since William Rufus' days; carved
eighteen hundred years ago, if one would believe, and very full of
pardon to faithful Lucchese; yet, to some, helpless.
There are, I suppose, no educated persons in Italy, and few in England,
who do not profess to admire Dante; and, perhaps, out of every hundred
of these admirers, three or four may have read the bit about Francesca
di Rimini, the death of Ugolino, and the description of the Venetian
Arsenal. But even of these honestly studious three or four we should
rarely find one, who knew why the Venetian Arsenal was described. You
shall hear, if you will.
"As, in the Venetian Arsenal, the pitch boils in the winter time,
wherewith to caulk their rotten ships ... so, not by fire, but divine
art, a thick pitch boiled there, beneath, which had plastered itself
all up over the banks on either side. But in it I could see nothing,
except the bubbles that its boiling raised, which from time to time
made it all swell up over its whole surface, and presently fell back
again depressed. And as I looked at it fixedly, and wondered, my guide
drew me back hastily, saying, 'Look, look!' And when I turned, I saw
behind us, a black devil come running along the rocks. Ah, how wild
his face! ah, how bitter his action as he came with his wings wide,
light upon his feet! On his shoulder he bore a sinner, grasped by both
haunches; and when he came to the bridge foot, he cried down into the
pit: 'Here's an ancient from Lucca; put him under, that I may fetch
more, for the land is full of such; there, for money, they make "No"
into "Yes" quickly.' And he cast him in and turned back,--never mastiff
fiercer after his prey. The thrown sinner plunged in the pitch, and
curled himself up; but the devils from under the bridge cried out,
'There's no holy face here; here one swims otherwise than in the
Serchio.' And they caught him with their hooks and pulled him under,
as cooks do the meat in broth; crying, 'People play here hidden;
so that they may filch in secret, if they can.'"
Doubtless, you consider all this extremely absurd, and are of opinion
that such things are not likely to happen in the next world. Perhaps
not; nor is it clear that Dante believed they would; but I should be
glad if you would tell me what you think is likely to happen there. In
the meantime, please to observe Dante's figurative meaning, which
is by no means absurd. Every one of his scenes has symbolic purpose,
down to the least detail. This lake of pitch is money, which, in our
own vulgar English phrase, "sticks to people's fingers;" it clogs
and plasters its margin all over, because the mind of a man bent on
dishonest gain makes everything within its reach dirty; it bubbles
up and down, because underhand gains nearly always involve alternate
excitement and depression; and it is haunted by the most cruel and
indecent of all the devils, because there is nothing so mean, and
nothing so cruel, but a peculator will do it. So you may read every
line figuratively, if you choose: all that I want is, that you should
be acquainted with the opinions of Dante concerning peculation. For
with the history of the five cities, I wish you to know also the
opinions, on all subjects personally interesting to you, of five
people who lived in them; namely, of Plato, Virgil, Dante, Victor
Carpaccio (whose opinions I must gather for you from his paintings,
for painting is the way Venetians write), and Shakespeare.
If, after knowing these five men's opinions on practical matters
(these five, as you will find, being all of the same mind), you
prefer to hold Mr. J. S. Mill's and Mr. Fawcett's opinions, you are
welcome. And indeed I may as well end this by at once examining some
of Mr. Fawcett's statements on the subject of Interest, that being one
of our chief modern modes of peculation; but, before we put aside Dante
for to-day, just note farther this, that while he has sharp punishment
for thieves, forgers, and peculators,--the thieves being changed
into serpents, the forgers covered with leprosy, and the peculators
boiled in pitch,--he has no punishment for bad workmen; no Tuscan
mind at that day being able to conceive such a ghastly sin as a man's
doing bad work wilfully; and, indeed, I think the Tuscan mind, and in
some degree the Piedmontese, retain some vestige of this old temper;
for though, not a fortnight since (on 3rd May), the cross of marble
in the arch-spandril next the east end of the Chapel of the Thorn at
Pisa was dashed to pieces before my eyes, as I was drawing it for my
class in heraldry at Oxford, by a stone-mason, that his master might
be paid for making a new one, I have no doubt the new one will be as
honestly like the old as master and man can make it; and Mr. Murray's
Guide will call it a judicious restoration. So also, though here,
the new Government is digging through the earliest rampart of Rome
(agger of Servius Tullius), to build a new Finance Office, which will
doubtless issue tenpenny notes in Latin, with the dignity of denarii
(the "pence" of your New Testament), I have every reason to suppose
the new Finance Office will be substantially built, and creditable
to its masons; (the veneering and cast-iron work being, I believe,
done mostly at the instigation of British building companies). But
it seems strange to me that, coming to Rome for quite other reasons,
I should be permitted by the Third Fors to see the agger of Tullius
cut through, for the site of a Finance Office, and his Mons Justitiæ
(Mount of Justice), presumably the most venerable piece of earth
in Italy, carted away, to make room for a railroad-station of
Piccola Velocità. For Servius Tullius was the first king who stamped
money with the figures of animals, and introduced a word among the
Romans with the sound of which Englishmen are also now acquainted,
"pecunia." Moreover, it is in speaking of this very agger of Tullius
that Livy explains in what reverence the Romans held the space between
the outer and inner walls of their cities, which modern Italy delights
to turn into a Boulevard.