Lucca, Pagnini's Hotel.
Dearest Kitty,--This must be the very shortest of letters, for we are on
the wing, and shall be for some days to come. Very few words, however,
will suffice to tell you that we have at length persuaded papa to come
on to Florence,--for the winter, of course. Rome will follow,--then
Naples,--_e poi?_--who knows! I think he must have received some very
agreeable tidings from your uncle Purcell, for he has been in better
spirits than I have seen him latterly, and shows something like a return
to his old vein of pleasantry. Not but I must own that it is what
the French would call, very often, a _mauvaise plaisanterie_ in its
exercise, his great amusement being to decry and disparage the people
of the Continent. He seems quite to forget that in every country the
traveller is, and must be, a mark for knavery and cheating. His newness
to the land, his ignorance, in almost all cases, of the language,
his occasional mistakes, all point him out as a proper subject
for imposition; and if the English come to compare notes with any
Continental country, I'm not so sure we should have much to plume
ourselves upon, as regards our treatment of strangers.
For our social misadventures abroad, it must be confessed that we are
mainly most to blame ourselves. All the counterfeits of rank, station,
and position are so much better done by foreigners than by our people,
that we naturally are more easily imposed on. Now in England, for
instance, it would be easier to be a duchess than to imitate one
successfully. All the attributes that go to make up such a station
abroad, might be assumed by any adventurer of little means and less
capacity. We forget--or, more properly speaking, we do not know--this,
when we come first on the Continent; hence the mistakes we fall into,
and the disasters that assail us.
It would be very disagreeable for me to explain at length how what
I mentioned to you about James's marriage has come to an untimely
conclusion. Enough when I say that the lady was not, in any respect,
what she had represented herself, and my dear brother may be said to
have had a most fortunate escape. Of course the poor fellow has suffered
considerably from the disappointment, nor are his better feelings
alleviated by the--I will say--very indelicate raillery papa is pleased
to indulge in on the subject. It is, however, a theme I do not care to
linger on, and I only thus passively allude to it that it may be buried
in oblivion between us.
We came along here from Genoa by the seaboard, a very beautiful and
picturesque road, traversing a wild range of the Apennines, and almost
always within view of the blue Mediterranean. At Spezia we loitered for
a day or two, to bathe, and I must say nothing can be more innocently
primitive than the practice as followed there.
Ladies and gentlemen--men and women, if you like it better--all meet in
the water as they do on land, or rather not as they do on land, but in
a very first-parentage state of no-dressedness. There they splash, swim,
dive, and converse,--float, flirt, talk gossip, and laugh with a most
laudable forgetfulness of externals. Introductions and presentations
go forward as they would in society, and a gentleman asks you to duck
instead of to dance with him. It would be affectation in me were I not
to say that I thought all this very shocking at first, and that I really
could scarcely bring myself to adopt it; but Lord George, who really
swims to perfection, laughed me out of some, and reasoned me out of
others of my prejudices, and I will own, dearest Kitty, his arguments
were unanswerable.
"Were you not very much ashamed," said he, "the first time you saw
a ballet, or 'poses plastiques'?--did not the whole strike you as
exceedingly indelicate?--and now, would not that very same sense of
shame occur to you as real indelicacy, since in these exhibitions it is
Art alone you admire,--Art in its graceful development? The 'Ballarina'
is not a woman; she is an ideal,--she is a Hebe, a Psyche, an Ariadne,
or an Aphrodite. Symmetry, grace, beauty of outline,--these are the
charms that fascinate you. Can you not, therefore, extend this spirit to
the sea, and, instead of the Marquis of this and the Countess of that,
only behold Tritono and sea-nymphs disporting in the flood?"
I saw at once the force of this reasoning, Kitty, and perceived that to
take any lower view of the subject would be really a gross indelicacy. I
tried to make Cary agree with me, but utterly in vain,--she is so devoid
of imagination! There is, too, an utter want of refinement in her mind
positively hopeless. She even confessed to me that Lord George without
his clothes still seemed Lord George to her, and that no effort she
could make was able to persuade her that the old Danish Minister in the
black leather skullcap had any resemblance to a river god. Mamma behaved
much better; seeing that the custom was one followed by all the "best
people," she adopted it at once, and though she would scream out
whenever a gentleman came to talk to her, I 'm sure, with a few
weeks' practice, she 'd have perfectly reconciled herself to "etiquette
in the water." Should you, with your very Irish notions, raise hands and
eyes at all this, and mutter, "How very dreadful!--how shocking!" and
so on, I have only to remind you of what the Princess Pauline said to an
English lady, who expressed her prudish horrors at the Princess having
"sat for Canova in wet drapery": "Oh, it was not so disagreeable as you
think; there was always a fire in the room." Now, Kitty, I make the same
reply to your shocked scruples, by saying the sea was deliciously warm.
Bathing is here, indeed, a glorious luxury. There is no shivering or
shuddering, no lips chattering, blue-nosed, goose-skinned misery, like
the home process! It is not a rush in, in desperation, a duck in agony,
and a dressing in ague, but a delicious lounge, associated with all the
enjoyments of scenery and society. The temperature of the sea is just
sufficiently below that of the air to invigorate without chilling, like
the tone of a company that stimulates without exhausting you. It is,
besides, indescribably pleasant to meet with a pastime so suggestive of
new themes of talk. Instead of the tiresome and trite topics of ballet
and balls, and dress and diamonds, your conversation smacks of salt
water, and every allusion "hath suffered a sea change." Instead of a
compliment to your dancing, the flattery is now on your diving; and he
who once offered his arm to conduct you to the "buffet," now proposes
his company to swim out to a lifebuoy!
And now let me get back to land once more, and you will begin to fancy
that your correspondent is Undine herself in disguise. I was very sorry
to leave Spezia, since I was just becoming an excellent swimmer. Indeed,
the surgeon of an American frigate assured me that he thought "I had
been raised in the Sandwich Islands,"--a compliment which, of course, I
felt bound to accept in the sense that most flattered me.
We passed through Carrara, stopping only to visit one or two of the
studios. They had not much to interest us, the artists being for the
most part copyists, and their works usually busts; busts being now the
same passion with our travelling countrymen as once were oil portraits.
The consequence is that every sculptor's shelves are loaded with
thin-lipped, grim-visaged English women, and triple-chinned,
apoplectic-looking aldermen, that contrast very unfavorably with the
clean-cut brows and sharply chiselled features of classic antiquity.
The English are an eminently good-looking race of people, seen in their
proper costume of broadcloth and velvet. They are manly and womanly. The
native characteristics of boldness, decision, and highhearted honesty
are conspicuous in all their traits; nor is there any deficiency in the
qualities of tenderness and gentleness. But with all this, when they
take off their neckcloths, they make but very indifferent Romans; and
he who looked a gentleman in his shirt-collar becomes, what James would
call, "an arrant snob" when seen in a toga. And yet they _will_ do it!
They have a notion that the Anglo-Saxon can do anything,--and so he can,
perhaps,--the difference being whether he can _look_ the character he
knows so well how to _act_.
We left Carrara by a little mountain path to visit the Bagni di Lucca,
a summer place, which once, in its days of Rouge-et-Noir celebrity, was
greatly resorted to. The Principality of Lucca possessed at that period,
too, its own reigning duke, and had not been annexed to Tuscany. Like
all these small States, without trade or commerce, its resources were
mainly derived from the Court; and, consequently, the withdrawal of the
Sovereign was the death-blow to all prosperity. It would be quite beyond
me to speculate on the real advantages or disadvantages resulting from
this practice of absorption, but pronouncing merely from externals, I
should say that the small States are great sufferers. Nothing can
be sadder than the aspect of this little capital. Ruined palaces,
grass-grown streets, tenantless houses, and half-empty shops are seen
everywhere. Poverty--I might call it misery--on every hand. The various
arts and trades cultivated had been those required by, even called into
existence by, the wants of a Court. All the usages of the place had
been made to conform to its courtly life and existence, and now this was
gone, and all the "occupation" with it! You are not perhaps aware that
this same territory of Lucca supplies nearly all of that tribe of image
and organ men so well known, not only through Europe, but over the vast
continent of America. They are skilful modellers naturally, and work
really beautiful things in "terra cotta." They are a hardy mountain
race, and, like all "montagnards," have an equal love for enterprise and
an attachment to home. Thus they traverse every land and sea, they labor
for years long in far-away climes, they endure hardships and privations
of every kind, supported by the one thought of the day when they can
return home again, and when in some high-perched mountain village--some
"granuolo," or "bennabbia "--they can rest from wandering, and, seated
amidst their kith and kind, tell of the wondrous things they have seen
in their journeyings. It is not uncommon here, in spots the very wildest
and least visited, to find a volume in English or French on the shelf of
some humble cottage: now it is perhaps a print, or an engraving of
some English landscape,--a spot, doubtless, endeared by some especial
recollection,--and not unfrequently a bird from Mexico--a bright-winged
parrot from the Brazils--shows where the wanderer's footsteps have borne
him, and shows, too, how even there the thoughts of home had followed.
Judged by our own experiences, these people are but scantily welcomed
amongst us. They are constantly associated in our minds with intolerable
hurdy-gurdies and execrable barrel-organs. They are the nightmare of
invalids, and the terror of all studious heads, and yet the wealth
with which they return shows that their gifts are both acknowledged and
rewarded. It must be that to many the organ-man is a pleasant visitor,
and the image-hawker a vendor of "high art" I have seen a great many of
them since we came here, and in their homes too; for mamma has taken
up the notion that these excellent people are all living in a state
of spiritual darkness and destitution, and to enlighten them has been
disseminating her precious little volume on the Miracles of Mount
Orsaro. It is plain to me that all this zeal of a woman of a foreign
nation seems to them a far more miraculous manifestation than anything
in her little book, and they stare and wonder at her in a way that
plainly shows a compassionate distrust of her sanity.
It is right I should say that Lord George thinks all these people knaves
and vagabonds; and James says they are a set of smugglers, and live by
contraband. Whatever be the true side of the picture, I must now leave
to your own acuteness, or rather to your prejudices, which for all
present purposes are quite good enough judges to decide.
Papa likes this place so much that he actually proposed passing the
winter here, for "cheapness,"--a very horrid thought, but which,
fortunately, Lord George averted by a private hint to the landlord of
the inn, saying that papa was rolling in wealth, but an awful miser; so
that when the bill made its appearance, with everything charged double,
papa's indignation turned to a perfect hatred of the town and all in it:
the consequence is that we are tomorrow to leave for Florence, which,
if but one half of what Lord George says be true, must be a real earthly
paradise. Not that I can possibly doubt him, for he has lived there two,
or, I believe, three winters,--knows everybody and everything. How I
long to see the Cascini, the Court Balls, the Private Theatricals, at
Prince Polywkowsky's, the picnics at Fiesole, and those dear receptions
at Madame della Montanare's, where, as Lord G. says, every one goes, and
"there's no absurd cant heard about character."
Indeed, to judge from Lord G.'s account, Florence--to use his own
words--is "the most advanced city in Europe;" that is to say, the
Florentines take a higher and more ample view of social philosophy than
any other people. The erring individual in our country is always treated
like the wounded crow,--the whole rookery is down upon him at once. Not
so here; he--or _she_, to speak more properly--is tenderly treated and
compassionated; all the little blandishments of society showered on her.
She is made to feel that the world is really not that ill-natured thing
sour moralists would describe it; and even if she feel indisposed to
return to safer paths, the perilous ones are made as pleasant for her
as it is possible. These are nearly his own words, dearest, and are they
not beautiful? so teeming with delicacy and true charity. And oh!
Kitty, I must say these are habits we do not practise at home in our
own country. But of this more hereafter; for the present, I can think of
nothing but the society of this delightful city, and am trying to learn
off by heart the names of all the charming houses in which he is to
introduce us. He has written, besides, to various friends in England
for letters for us, so that we shall be unquestionably better off
here--socially speaking--than in any other city of the Continent.
We leave this after breakfast to-morrow; and before the end of the week
it is likely you may hear from me again, for I am longing to give you
my first impressions of Firenza la Bella; till when, I am, as ever, your
dearly attached
Mary Anne Dodd.
P. S. Great good fortune, Kitty,--we shall arrive in time for the races.
Lord G. has got a note from Prince Pincecotti, asking him to ride
his horse "Bruise-drog,"--which, it seems, is the Italian for
"Bull-dog,"--and he consents. He is to wear my colors, too,
dearest,--green and white,--and I have promised to make him a present of
his jacket How handsome he _will_ look in jockey dress!
James is in distraction at being too heavy for even a hurdle-race;
but as he is six feet one, and stout in proportion, it is out of the
question. Lord G. insists upon it that Cary and I must go on horseback.
Mamma agrees with him, and papa as stoutly resists. It is in vain we
tell him that all depends on the way we open the campaign here, and that
the present opportunity is a piece of rare good fortune; he is in one of
his obstinate moods, and mutters something about "beggars on horseback,"
and the place they "ride to." I open my letter to say--carried
triumphantly, dearest--we _are_ to ride.