1877
I
I waited in Paris until after the elections for the new Chamber (they
took place on the 14th of October); for only after one had learned that
the celebrated attempt of Marshal MacMahon and his ministers to drive
the French nation to the polls like a flock of huddling sheep, each with
the white ticket of an official candidate round his neck, had not
achieved the success which the energy of the process might have
promised--only then was it possible to draw a long breath and deprive
the republican party of such support as might have been conveyed in
one's sympathetic presence. Seriously speaking, too, the weather had
been enchanting, and there were Italian sensations to be encountered
without leaving the banks of the Seine. Day after day the air was filled
with golden light, and even those chalkish vistas of the Parisian _beaux
quartiers_ assumed the iridescent tints of autumn. Autumn-weather in
Europe is often such a very sorry affair that a fair-minded American
will have it on his conscience to call attention to a rainless and
radiant October.
The echoes of the electoral strife kept me company for a while after
starting upon that abbreviated journey to Turin, which, as you leave
Paris at night, in a train unprovided with encouragements to slumber, is
a singular mixture of the odious and the charming. The charming,
however, I think, prevails; for the dark half of the journey is, in
fact, the least interesting. The morning light ushers you into the
romantic gorges of the Jura, and after a big bowl of _café au lait_ at
Culoz you may compose yourself comfortably for the climax of your
spectacle. The day before leaving Paris I met a French friend who had
just returned from a visit to a Tuscan country-seat, where he had been
watching the vintage. "Italy," he said, "is more lovely than words can
tell, and France, steeped in this electoral turmoil, seems no better
than a bear-garden." That part of the bear-garden through which you
travel as you approach the Mont-Cenis seemed to me that day very
beautiful. The autumn colouring, thanks to the absence of rain, had been
vivid and crisp, and the vines that swung their low garlands between the
mulberries, in the neighbourhood of Chambéry, looked like long festoons
of coral and amber. The frontier station of Modane, on the farther side
of the Mont-Cenis tunnel, is a very ill-regulated place; but even the
most irritable of tourists, meeting it on his way southward, will be
disposed to consider it good-naturedly. There is far too much bustling
and scrambling, and the facilities afforded you for the obligatory
process of ripping open your luggage before the officers of the Italian
custom-house are much scantier than should be; but, for myself, there is
something that deprecates irritation in the shabby green and gray
uniforms of all the Italian officials who stand loafing about and
watching the northern invaders scramble back into marching order.
Wearing an administrative uniform does not necessarily spoil a man's
temper, as in France one is sometimes led to believe; for these
excellent under-paid Italians carry theirs as lightly as possible, and
their answers to your inquiries do not in the least bristle with
rapiers, buttons, and cockades. After leaving Modane you slide straight
downhill into the Italy of your desire; and there is something very
impressive in the way the road edges along those great precipices which
stand shoulder to shoulder, in a long perpendicular file, until they
finally admit you to a distant glimpse of the ancient capital of
Piedmont.
Turin is not a city to make, in vulgar parlance, a fuss about, and I pay
an extravagant tribute to subjective emotion in speaking of it as
ancient. But if the place is not so peninsular as Florence and Rome, at
least it is more so than New York and Paris; and while the traveller
walks about the great arcades and looks at the fourth-rate shop windows,
he does not scruple to cultivate a shameless optimism. Relatively
speaking, Turin is diverting; but there is, after all, no reason in a
large collection of shabbily-stuccoed houses, disposed in a rigidly
rectangular manner, for passing a day of deep, still gaiety. The only
reason, I am afraid, is the old superstition of Italy--that property in
the very look of the written word, the evocation of a myriad images,
that makes any lover of the arts take Italian satisfactions upon easier
terms than any other. Italy is an idea to conjure with, and we play
tricks upon our credulity even with such inferior apparatus as is
offered to our hand at Turin. I walked about all the morning under the
tall porticoes, thinking it sufficient entertainment to take note of the
soft, warm air, of that colouring of things in Italy that is at once
broken and harmonious, and of the comings and goings, the physiognomy
and manners, of the excellent Turinese. I had opened the old book again;
the old charm was in the style; I was in a more delightful world. I saw
nothing surpassingly beautiful or curious; but the appreciative
traveller finds a vividness in nameless details. And I must add that on
the threshold of Italy he tastes of one solid and perfectly definable
pleasure, in finding himself among the traditions of the grand style in
architecture. It must be said that we have still to come to Italy to see
great houses. (I am speaking more particularly of town-architecture.) In
northern cities there are beautiful houses, picturesque and curious
houses; sculptured gables that hang over the street, charming
bay-windows, hooded doorways, elegant proportions, and a profusion of
delicate ornament; but a good specimen of an old Italian palazzo has a
nobleness that is all its own. We laugh at Italian "palaces," at their
peeling paint, their nudity, their dreariness; but they have the great
palatial quality--elevation and extent. They make smaller houses seem
beggarly; they round their great arches and interspace their huge
windows with a noble indifference to the cost of materials. These grand
proportions--the colossal basements, the doorways that seem meant for
cathedrals, the far-away cornices--impart by contrast a humble and
_bourgeois_ expression to those less exalted dwellings in which the air
of grandeur depends largely upon the help of the upholsterer. At Turin
my first feeling was really one of shame for the architectural manners
of our northern lands. I have heard people who know the Italians well
say that at bottom they despise all the rest of mankind and regard them
as barbarians. I doubt of it, for the Italians strike me as having less
national vanity than any other people in Europe; but if the charge had
its truth there would be some ground for the feeling in the fact that
they live in palaces.
An impression which, on coming back to Italy, I find even stronger than
when it was first received is that of the contrast between the fecundity
of the great artistic period and the vulgarity of the Italian genius of
to-day. The first few hours spent on Italian soil are sufficient to
renew it, and the phenomenon that I allude to is surely one of the most
singular in human history. That the people who but three hundred years
ago had the best taste in the world should now have the worst; that
having produced the noblest, loveliest, costliest works, they should now
be given up to the manufacture of objects at once ugly and paltry; that
the race of which Michael Angelo and Raphael, Leonardo and Titian were
characteristic should have no other title to distinction than third-rate
_genre_ pictures and catchpenny statues--all this is a frequent
perplexity to the observer of actual Italian life. The flower of art in
these latter years has ceased to bloom very powerfully anywhere; but
nowhere does it seem so drooping and withered as in the shadow of the
immortal embodiments of the old Italian genius. You go into a church or
a gallery and feast your fancy upon a splendid picture or an exquisite
piece of sculpture, and on issuing from the door that has admitted you
to the beautiful past you are confronted with something that has all the
effect of a very bad joke. The aspect of your lodging (the carpets, the
curtains, the upholstery in general, with their crude and violent
colouring and their vulgar material), the third-rate look of the shops,
the extreme bad taste of the dress of the women, the cheapness and
baseness of every attempt at decoration in the cafés and railway
stations, the hopeless frivolity of everything that pretends to be a
work of art--all this modern crudity runs riot over the relics of the
great period.
We can do a thing for the first time but once; it is but once for all
that we can have a pleasure in its freshness. This is a law which is not
on the whole, I think, to be regretted, for we sometimes learn to know
things better by not enjoying them too much. It is certain, however, at
the same time, that a traveller who has worked off the primal
fermentation of his relish for this inexhaustibly interesting country
has by no means entirely drained the cup. After thinking of Italy as
historical and artistic, it will do him no great harm to think of her,
for a while, as modern, an idea supposed (as a general thing correctly)
to be fatally at variance with the Byronic, the Ruskinian, the artistic,
poetic, æsthetic manner of considering this fascinating peninsula. He
may grant--I don't say it is absolutely necessary--that modern Italy is
ugly, prosaic, provokingly out of relation to the diary and the album;
it is nevertheless true that, at the point things have come to, modern
Italy in a manner imposes herself! I had not been many hours in the
country before I became conscious of this circumstance; and I may add
that, the first irritation past, I found myself able to accept it. And
if we think of it, nothing is more easy to understand than a certain
displeasure on the part of the young Italy of to-day at being looked at
by all the world as a kind of soluble pigment. Young Italy, preoccupied
with its economical and political future, must be heartily tired of
being admired for its eyelashes and its pose. In one of Thackeray's
novels there is mention of a young artist who sent to the Royal Academy
a picture representing "A Contadino dancing with a Trasteverina at the
door of a Locanda, to the music of a Pifferaro." It is in this attitude
and with these conventional accessories that the world has hitherto seen
fit to represent young Italy, and I do not wonder that, if the youth has
any spirit, he should at last begin to resent our insufferable æsthetic
patronage. He has established a line of tram-cars in Rome, from the
Porta del Popolo to the Ponte Molle, and it is on one of these
democratic vehicles that I seem to see him taking his triumphant course
down the vista of the future. I will not pretend to rejoice with him any
more than I really do; I will not pretend, as the sentimental tourists
say about it all, as if it were the setting of an intaglio or the border
of a Roman scarf, to "like" it. Like it or not, as we may, it is
evidently destined to be; I see a new Italy in the future which in many
important respects will equal, if not surpass, the most enterprising
sections of our native land. Perhaps by that time Chicago and San
Francisco will have acquired a pose, and their sons and daughters will
dance at the doors of _locande_. However this may be, a vivid impression
of an accomplished schism between the old Italy and the new is, as the
French say, _le plus clair_ of a new visit to this ever-suggestive part
of the world. The old Italy has become more and more of a museum,
preserved and perpetuated in the midst of the new, but without any
further relation to it--it must be admitted, indeed, that such a
relation is considerable--than that of the stock on his shelves to the
shopkeeper, or of the Siren of the South to the showman who stands
before his booth. More than once, as we move about nowadays in the
Italian cities, there seems to pass before our eyes a vision of the
coming years. It represents to our satisfaction an Italy united and
prosperous, but altogether commercial. The Italy, indeed, that we
sentimentalise and romance about was an ardently mercantile country;
though I suppose it loved not its ledgers less, but its frescoes and
altar-pieces more. Scattered through this brilliantly economical
community--this country of a thousand ports--we see a large number of
beautiful buildings, in which an endless series of dusky pictures are
darkening, dampening, fading, failing, through the years. At the doors
of the beautiful buildings are little turnstiles, at which there sit a
great many men in uniform, to whom the visitor pays a ten-penny fee.
Inside, in the vaulted and frescoed chambers, the art of Italy lies
buried, as in a thousand mausoleums. It is well taken care of; it is
constantly copied; sometimes it is "restored"--as in the case of that
beautiful boy-figure of Andrea del Sarto, at Florence, which may be seen
at the gallery of the Uffizi, with its honourable duskiness quite peeled
off and heaven knows what raw, bleeding cuticle laid bare. One evening
lately, in Florence, in the soft twilight, I took a stroll among those
encircling hills on which the massive villas are mingled with the
vaporous olives. Presently I arrived where three roads met at a wayside
shrine, in which, before some pious daub of an old-time Madonna, a
little votive lamp glimmered through the evening air. The hour, the
lovely evening, the place, the twinkling taper, the sentiment of the
observer, the thought that some one had been rescued here from an
assassin, or from some other peril, and had set up a little grateful
altar in consequence, in the yellow-plastered wall of a tangled
_podere_; all this led me to approach the shrine with a reverent, an
emotional step. I drew near it, but after a few steps I paused. I became
conscious of an incongruous odour; it seemed to me that the evening air
was charged with a perfume which, although to a certain extent familiar,
had not hitherto associated itself with rustic frescoes and wayside
altars. I gently interrogated the atmosphere, and the operation left me
no doubts. The odour was that of petroleum; the votive taper was
nourished with the national fluid of Pennsylvania. I confess that I
burst out laughing, and a picturesque contadino, wending his homeward
way in the dusk, stared at me as if I were an iconoclast. If he noticed
the petroleum, it was only, I imagine, to sniff it gratefully; but to me
the thing served as a symbol of the Italy of the future. There is a
horse-car from the Porta del Popolo to the Ponte Molle, and the Tuscan
shrines are fed with kerosene.