IV

I had never known Florence more charming than I found her for a week in

that brilliant October. She sat in the sunshine beside her yellow river

like the little treasure-city that she has always seemed, without

commerce, without other industry than the manufacture of mosaic

paper-weights and alabaster Cupids, without actuality, or energy, or

earnestness, or any of those rugged virtues which in most cases are

deemed indispensable for civic robustness; with nothing but the little

unaugmented stock of her mediæval memories, her tender-coloured

mountains, her churches and palaces, pictures and statues. There were

very few strangers; one's detested fellow sight-seer was infrequent; the

native population itself seemed scanty; the sound of wheels in the

streets was but occasional; by eight o'clock at night, apparently, every

one had gone to bed, and the wandering tourist, still wandering, had the

place to himself--had the thick shadow-masses of the great palaces, and

the shafts of moonlight striking the polygonal paving-stones, and the

empty bridges, and the silvered yellow of the Arno, and the stillness

broken only by a homeward step, accompanied by a snatch of song from a

warm Italian voice. My room at the inn looked out on the river, and was

flooded all day with sunshine. There was an absurd orange-coloured paper

on the walls; the Arno, of a hue not altogether different, flowed

beneath; and on the other side of it rose a line of sallow houses, of

extreme antiquity, crumbling and mouldering, bulging and protruding over

the stream. (I seem to speak of their fronts; but what I saw was their

shabby backs, which were exposed to the cheerful flicker of the river,

while the fronts stood for ever in the deep, damp shadow of a narrow

mediæval street.) All this brightness and yellowness was a perpetual

delight; it was a part of that indefinably charming colour which

Florence always seems to wear as you look up and down at it from the

river, from the bridges and quays. This is a kind of grave brilliancy--a

harmony of high tints--which I know not how to describe. There are

yellow walls and green blinds and red roofs, and intervals of brilliant

brown and natural-looking blue; but the picture is not spotty nor gaudy,

thanks to the colours being distributed in large and comfortable masses,

and to its being washed over, as it were, by some happy softness of

sunshine. The river-front of Florence is, in short, a delightful

composition. Part of its charm comes, of course, from the generous

aspect of those high-based Tuscan palaces which a renewal of

acquaintance with them has again commended to me as the most dignified

dwellings in the world. Nothing can be finer than that look of giving up

the whole immense ground-floor to simple purposes of vestibule and

staircase, of court and high-arched entrance; as if this were all but a

massive pedestal for the real habitation, and people were not properly

housed unless, to begin with, they should be lifted fifty feet above the

pavement. The great blocks of the basement; the great intervals,

horizontally and vertically, from window to window (telling of the

height and breadth of the rooms within); the armorial shield hung

forward at one of the angles; the wide-brimmed roof, overshadowing the

narrow street; the rich old browns and yellows of the walls--these

definite elements are put together with admirable art.

Take one of these noble structures out of its oblique situation in the

town; call it no longer a palace, but a villa; set it down upon a

terrace, on one of the hills that encircle Florence, with a row of

high-waisted cypresses beside it, a grassy courtyard, and a view of the

Florentine towers and the valley of the Arno, and you will think it

perhaps even more worthy of your esteem. It was a Sunday noon, and

brilliantly warm, when I arrived in Florence; and after I had looked

from my windows a while at that quietly-basking river-front I have

spoken of, I took my way across one of the bridges and then out of one

of the gates--that immensely tall Roman Gate, in which the space from

the top of the arch to the cornice (except that there is scarcely a

cornice, it is all a plain, massive piece of wall) is as great (or seems

to be) as that from the ground to the former point. Then I climbed a

steep and winding way--much of it a little dull, if one likes, being

bounded by mottled, mossy garden-walls--to a villa on a hill-top, where

I found various things that touched me with almost too fine a point.

Seeing them again, often, for a week, both by sunlight and moonshine, I

never quite learned not to covet them; not to feel that not being a part

of them was somehow to miss an exquisite chance. What a tranquil,

contented life it seemed, with romantic beauty as a part of its daily

texture!--the sunny terrace, with its tangled _podere_ beneath it; the

bright gray olives against the bright blue sky; the long, serene,

horizontal lines of other villas, flanked by their upward cypresses,

disposed upon the neighbouring hills; the richest little city in the

world in a softly-scooped hollow at one's feet, and beyond it the most

appealing of views, the most majestic, yet the most familiar. Within the

villa was a great love of art and a painting-room full of successful

work, so that if human life there seemed very tranquil, the tranquillity

meant simply contentment and devoted occupation. A beautiful occupation

in that beautiful position, what could possibly be better? That is what

I spoke just now of envying--a way of life that is not afraid of a

little isolation and tolerably quiet days. When such a life presents

itself in a dull or an ugly place, we esteem it, we admire it, but we do

not feel it to be the ideal of good fortune. When, however, the people

who lead it move as figures in an ancient, noble landscape, and their

walks and contemplations are like a turning of the leaves of history, we

seem to have before us an admirable case of virtue made easy; meaning

here by virtue, contentment and concentration, the love of privacy and

study. One need not be exacting if one lives among local conditions that

are of themselves constantly suggestive. It is true, indeed, that I

might, after a certain time, grow weary of a regular afternoon stroll

among the Florentine lanes; of sitting on low parapets, in intervals of

flower-topped wall, and looking across at Fiesole, or down the rich-hued

valley of the Arno; of pausing at the open gates of villas and wondering

at the height of cypresses and the depth of loggias; of walking home in

the fading light and noting on a dozen westward-looking surfaces the

glow of the opposite sunset. But for a week or so all this was

delightful. The villas are innumerable, and if one is a stranger half

the talk is about villas. This one has a story; that one has another;

they all look as if they had stories. Most of them are offered to rent

(many of them for sale) at prices unnaturally low; you may have a tower

and a garden, a chapel and an expanse of thirty windows, for five

hundred dollars a year. In imagination, you hire three or four; you take

possession, and settle, and live there. About the finest there is

something very grave and stately; about two or three of the best there

is something even solemn and tragic. From what does this latter

impression come? You gather it as you stand there in the early dusk,

looking at the long, pale-brown façade, the enormous windows, the iron

cages fastened upon the lower ones. Part of the brooding expression of

these great houses comes, even when they have not fallen into decay,

from their look of having outlived their original use. Their

extraordinary largeness and massiveness are a satire upon their present

fate. They were not built with such a thickness of wall and depth of

embrasure, such a solidity of staircase and superfluity of stone, simply

to afford an economical winter residence to English and American

families. I know not whether it was the appearance of these stony old

villas, which seemed so dumbly conscious of a change of manners, that

threw a tinge of melancholy over the general prospect; certain it is

that, having always found this plaintive note in the view of Florence,

it seemed to me now particularly distinct. "Lovely, lovely, but it makes

me blue," the fanciful stranger could not but murmur to himself as, in

the late afternoon, he looked at the landscape from over one of the low

parapets, and then, with his hands in his pockets, turned away indoors

to candles and dinner.

V

Below, in the city, in wandering about in the streets and churches and

museums, it was impossible not to have a good deal of the same feeling;

but here the impression was more easy to analyse. It came from a sense

of the perfect separateness of all the great productions of the

Renaissance from the present and the future of the place, from the

actual life and manners, the native ideal I have already spoken of the

way in which the great aggregation of beautiful works of art in the

Italian cities strikes the visitor nowadays (so far as present Italy is

concerned) as the mere stock-in-trade of an impecunious but thrifty

people. It is this metaphysical desertedness and loneliness of the great

works of architecture and sculpture that deposits a certain weight upon

the heart; when we see a great tradition broken we feel something of the

pain with which we hear a stifled cry. But regret is one thing and

resentment is another. Seeing one morning, in a shop-window, the series

of _Mornings in Florence_, published a few years since by Mr. Ruskin, I

made haste to enter and purchase these amusing little books, some

passages of which I remembered formerly to have read. I could not turn

over many pages without observing that the "separateness" of the new and

old which I just mentioned had produced in their author the liveliest

irritation. With the more acute phases of this sentiment it was

difficult to sympathise, for the simple reason, it seems to me, that it

savours of arrogance to demand of any people, as a right of one's own,

that they shall be artistic. "Be artistic yourselves!" is the very

natural reply that young Italy has at hand for English critics and

censors. When a people produces beautiful statues and pictures it gives

us something more than is set down in the bond, and we must thank it for

its generosity; and when it stops producing them or caring for them we

may cease thanking, but we hardly have a right to begin and abuse it.

The wreck of Florence, says Mr. Ruskin, "is now too ghastly and

heart-breaking to any human soul that remembers the days of old;" and

these desperate words are an allusion to the fact that the little square

in front of the cathedral, at the foot of Giotto's Tower, with the grand

Baptistery on the other side, is now the resort of a number of

hackney-coaches and omnibuses. This fact is doubtless lamentable, and it

would be a hundred times more agreeable to see among people who have

been made the heirs of so priceless a work of art as the sublime

campanile some such feeling about it as would keep it free even from the

danger of defilement. A cab-stand is a very ugly and dirty thing, and

Giotto's Tower should have nothing in common with such conveniences. But

there is more than one way of taking such things, and a quiet traveller,

who has been walking about for a week with his mind full of the

sweetness and suggestiveness of a hundred Florentine places, may feel at

last, in looking into Mr. Ruskin's little tracts that, discord for

discord, there is not much to choose between the importunity of the

author's personal ill-humour and the incongruity of horse-pails and

bundles of hay. And one may say this without being at all a partisan of

the doctrine of the inevitableness of new desecrations. For my own part,

I believe there are few things in this line that the new Italian spirit

is not capable of, and not many, indeed, that we are not destined to

see. Pictures and buildings will not be completely destroyed, because in

that case foreigners with full pockets would cease to visit the country,

and the turn-stiles at the doors of the old palaces and convents, with

the little patented slit for absorbing your half-franc, would grow quite

rusty, and creak with disuse. But it is safe to say that the new Italy,

growing into an old Italy again, will continue to take her elbow-room

wherever she finds it.

I am almost ashamed to say what I did with Mr. Ruskin's little books. I

put them into my pocket and betook myself to Santa Maria Novella. There

I sat down, and after I had looked about for a while at the beautiful

church, I drew them forth one by one, and read the greater part of them.

Occupying one's self with light literature in a great religious edifice

is perhaps as bad a piece of profanation as any of those rude dealings

which Mr. Ruskin justly deplores; but a traveller has to make the most

of odd moments, and I was waiting for a friend in whose company I was to

go and look at Giotto's beautiful frescoes in the cloister of the

church. My friend was a long time coming, so that I had an hour with Mr.

Ruskin, whom I called just now a light _littérateur_, because in these

little Mornings in Florence he is for ever making his readers laugh. I

remembered, of course, where I was; and, in spite of my latent hilarity,

I felt that I had rarely got such a snubbing. I had really been enjoying

the good old city of Florence; but I now learned from Mr. Ruskin that

this was a scandalous waste of charity. I should have gone about with an

imprecation on my lips, I should have worn a face three yards long. I

had taken great pleasure in certain frescoes by Ghirlandaio, in the

choir of that very church; but it appeared from one of the little books

that these frescoes were as naught. I had much admired Santa Croce, and

I had thought the Duomo a very noble affair; but I had now the most

positive assurance I knew nothing about it. After a while, if it was

only ill-humour that was needed for doing honour to the city of the

Medici, I felt that I had risen to a proper level; only now it was Mr.

Ruskin himself I had lost patience with, and not the stupid Brunelleschi

and the vulgar Ghirlandaio. Indeed, I lost patience altogether, and

asked myself by what right this informal votary of form pretended to run

riot through a quiet traveller's relish for the noblest of

pleasures--his wholesome enjoyment of the loveliest of cities. The

little books seemed invidious and insane, and it was only when I

remembered that I had been under no obligation to buy them that I

checked myself in repenting of having done so. Then, at last, my friend

arrived, and we passed together out of the church, and through the first

cloister beside it, into a smaller enclosure, where we stood a while to

look at the tomb of the Marchesa Strozzi-Ridolfi, upon which the great

Giotto has painted four superb little pictures. It was easy to see the

pictures were superb; but I drew forth one of my little books again, for

I had observed that Mr. Ruskin spoke of them. Hereupon I recovered my

tolerance; for what could be better in this case, I asked myself, than

Mr. Ruskin's remarks? They are, in fact, excellent and charming, and

full of appreciation of the deep and simple beauty of the great

painter's work. I read them aloud to my companion; but my companion was

rather, as the phrase is, "put off" by them. One of the frescoes (it is

a picture of the birth of the Virgin) contains a figure coming through a

door. "Of ornament," I quote, "there is only the entirely simple outline

of the vase which the servant carries; of colour two or three masses of

sober red and pure white, with brown and gray. That is all," Mr. Ruskin

continues. "And if you are pleased with this you can see Florence. But

if not, by all means amuse yourself there, if you find it amusing, as

long as you like; you can never see it." _You can never see it_. This

seemed to my friend insufferable, and I had to shuffle away the book

again, so that we might look at the fresco with the unruffled geniality

it deserves. We agreed afterwards, when in a more convenient place I

read aloud a good many more passages from Mr. Ruskin's tracts, that

there are a great many ways of seeing Florence, as there are of seeing

most beautiful and interesting things, and that it is very dry and

pedantic to say that the happy vision depends upon our squaring our toes

with a certain particular chalk-mark. We see Florence wherever and

whenever we enjoy it, and for enjoying it we find a great many more

pretexts than Mr. Ruskin seems inclined to allow. My friend and I agreed

also, however, that the little books were an excellent purchase, on

account of the great charm and felicity of much of their incidental

criticism; to say nothing, as I hinted just now, of their being

extremely amusing. Nothing, in fact, is more comical than the familiar

asperity of the author's style and the pedagogic fashion in which he

pushes and pulls his unhappy pupils about, jerking their heads toward

this, rapping their knuckles for that, sending them to stand in corners,

and giving them Scripture texts to copy. But it is neither the

felicities nor the aberrations of detail, in Mr. Ruskin's writings, that

are the main affair for most readers; it is the general tone that, as I

have said, puts them off or draws them on. For many persons he will

never bear the test of being read in this rich old Italy, where art, so

long as it really lived at all, was spontaneous, joyous, irresponsible.

If the reader is in daily contact with those beautiful Florentine works

which do still, in a way, force themselves into notice through the

vulgarity and cruelty of modern profanation, it will seem to him that

Mr. Ruskin's little books are pitched in the strangest falsetto key.

"One may read a hundred pages of this sort of thing," said my friend,

"without ever dreaming that he is talking about _art_. You can say

nothing worse about it than that." And that is very true. Art is the one

corner of human life in which we may take our ease. To justify our

presence there the only thing that is demanded of us is that we shall

have a passion for representation. In other places our passions are

conditioned and embarrassed; we are allowed to have only so many as are

consistent with those of our neighbours; with their convenience and

well-being, with their convictions and prejudices, their rules and

regulations. Art means an escape from all this. Wherever her brilliant

standard floats the need for apologies and exonerations is over; there

it is enough simply that we please or that we are pleased. There the

tree is judged only by its fruits. If these are sweet, one is welcome to

pluck them.

One may read a great many pages of Mr. Ruskin without getting a hint of

this delightful truth; a hint of the not unimportant fact that art,

after all, is made for us, and not we for art. This idea of the value of

a work of art being the amount of illusion it yields is conspicuous by

its absence. And as for Mr. Ruskin's world of art being a place where we

may take life easily, woe to the luckless mortal who enters it with any

such disposition. Instead of a garden of delight, he finds a sort of

assize-court, in perpetual session. Instead of a place in which human

responsibilities are lightened and suspended, he finds a region governed

by a kind of Draconic legislation. His responsibilities, indeed, are

tenfold increased; the gulf between truth and error is for ever yawning

at his feet; the pains and penalties of this same error are advertised,

in apocalyptic terminology, upon a thousand sign-posts; and the poor

wanderer soon begins to look back with infinite longing to the lost

paradise of the artless. There can be no greater want of tact in dealing

with those things with which men attempt to ornament life than to be

perpetually talking about "error." A truce to all rigidities is the law

of the place; the only thing that is absolute there is sensible charm.

The grim old bearer of the scales excuses herself; she feels that this

is not her province. Differences here are not iniquity and

righteousness; they are simply variations of temperament and of point of

view. We are not under theological government.