Is any one so courageous as to wish for a glimpse of the city and the
landscape of the future, two centuries and a half hence? Even if so, he
can hardly desire it so warmly as the fainter-hearted desires the sight
of the past. At any rate, if there be any scene that we would willingly
be admitted to see as it is to be, that scene is not in Italy.
Thither would we willingly journey not later than in the day of John
Evelyn, when he travelled in his youthful dignity, provided with
letters, and spent some seasons in Rome, and studied for a year at the
University of Padua. Every one knows his journal of the English Church
under the Commonwealth, of the Plague, of the Fire, of the Court of
Charles II. But not the least charming part of one of the most readable
of books—a book written in an English prose that had not yet undergone
much manipulation, but was still a little rigid, but rigid with
vitality—is somewhat neglected; it is the part that records this
progress through France to the Coast, and thence into Italy as far as
Naples, and home by Venice, the Lakes, the Simplon Pass, and
Switzerland. The happy man! When he drew near, after peril of shipwreck,
to the port of Genoa, he ‘perfectly smelt the joyes of Italy’. This was
off the noble village of Sanpierdarena, where now you may smell the
odour of factories—soap-boiling and other things—for it has lately come
to be stifled with thick smoke, and the mountain gardens are dying with
their blackened arbours. Only of late have those ancient, coloured
terraces, coloured as a few masterly landscapes are painted, so that a
little of the canvas, or a little of the view, might be set in a ring
and worn as a jewel—only of late have the gardens, once in rich and
fortunate neglect, ceased to breathe their ancient breath.
‘We recovered the shore, which we now kept in view within half a league,
in sight of those pleasant villas, and within scent of those fragrant
orchards which are on this coast, full of princely retirements for the
sumptuousnesse of their buildings and noblesse of the plantations, from
whence, the wind blowing as it did, might perfectly be smelt the joyes
of Italy, in the perfumes of orange, citron, and jasmine flowers for
divers leagues seaward.’ And Evelyn was so much struck by the aura of
this coast as to record it again in the dedication of his ‘Fumifugium’
to Charles II. What has befallen Sanpierdarena—that one place precisely,
of all others—in the years just past makes the whole incident of this
welcoming message from the cultivated lands, and of the ensuing treatise
and its title, sound somewhat cruel in irony.
John Evelyn tried in vain to stay the approaching smoke, as he tried
also—by an application to the same monarch—to avert the course of
fashion in the then important dress of men. The East he thought better
worth following than France, and he proposed a whole revision of the
Western mode, and presented the King with a plan whereby the trivial
fashions of ‘the monsieurs’ were to be exchanged for an Oriental
‘noblesse’. Charles accepted the pamphlet, and was soon after seen to
wear a Persian robe; but he rather shabbily left Evelyn to conjecture,
in silence, that it was his advice that had been taken. In the end, the
King slid back, and ‘the monsieurs’ had it. If John Evelyn had had that
glimpse into the future which few of us desire to-day, how could he have
endured those French inventions to which the East has now been partly
converted, and the fumes of that ash-strewn piece of coast? ‘But a
soap-factory!’ cries the English reader, seeing all kinds of happy
national sarcasm in the industry that, among others, has brought about
this special local change. It happens, however, pat to this matter of
soap, that Evelyn makes a note to the effect that he bought, in one of
the towns of North Italy, certain ‘wash-balls’ which seemed to be new to
him; he speaks of them as a useful invention. Before the factory had
taken the place of the fragrant orchards the people of that coast had
the constant custom of washing all their clothes. It is much to be
feared that the smoke of the soap-factory has already put an end to that
habit by making it too difficult, or impossible.
Some consolation is to be found in this—that if a mile of that
incomparable coast is spoilt, there remain scores of miles all
untouched, differing only in the lesser majesty of the houses and
gardens with their great sea-walls. The ‘sumptuousnesse’ admired by
Evelyn will never be restored; but of the mere walls of those rougher
houses too, in their place in the landscape, pieces might be set as
jewels. It was always in praise of gardens that Evelyn wrote. Otherwise
the general modern complaint as to the insensibility of the older
writers to the daily splendours of nature is hardly unjust in his case.
He, without noting, saw the change of skies that sets alight the world
when you have crossed the Alps; and of the further illumination of a
southern spring he says nothing; but he makes mention of the
‘extraordinary long’ tail of a horse, which he saw in a collection of
curiosities, nor do two horns of as many unicorns go unrecorded, for he
had a grave and simple admiration of such things as petrifactions, flies
in amber, and all minor marvels. Nor does he cease to be a learned and
most responsible man, in whose adult but innocent style we are to see
nothing contrary to the dignities of State and office. The false air of
childishness which this kind of English gives to the style of Pepys
always makes his public functions and honours seem to us incongruous. In
Evelyn’s _Diary_, by the way, we meet Mr. Pepys, about some Admiralty
business, with so much solemnity that we hardly know him again.
It is Italy that seems (by her people) to have an air of childishness in
our eyes to-day. I have to confess that when I hear an Italian say
something to the purpose I always cry inwardly ‘How intelligent!’ But in
those days England took frankly a lower place. It could not be
otherwise, seeing that the late Renaissance as it was then in Rome had
imposed law and taste upon the whole of Europe. Evelyn had nothing
whatever to be proud of at home, inasmuch as he was ashamed of York
Minster, Lincoln, Durham, and the rest; inasmuch, too, as Shakespeare’s
name occurs not once in his book. He never doubts that modern art had
reached its culmination in St. Peter’s and the Lateran, in Guido Reni
and Domenichino.
He found all those splendours new, and it is no wonder if he was
convinced that all this art in course of progress, as it was visibly,
must be better integrally than what had gone before. He took no notice
of the earlier masters of any of the schools, but admired precisely as
Horace Walpole admired, and on the same scale and according to the same
order. He was diligent in the galleries, but the student of to-day is
dismayed to see no Botticelli up or down the page, and to find the
polite English traveller in rapture before the blatant Bernini.
Englishmen, in a word, paid Italy the great compliment of taking her at
the highest estimation as she was at the moment. There was no painful
comparison with any period of the past, for we have evidence in his
works that Bernini was not afraid of antiquity itself. In arts, in
letters, in arms, in science especially, Italy was foremost in present
action—_there_ was her splendour, as we may find it hard to realize.
Evelyn sent home preparations from her schools of anatomy to the Royal
Society, to which such things were new.
And as to the gardens, happy was this traveller, who was soon after to
plan the hedges and alleys of Wotton and of Sayes Court, in such a
school of gardens. He had, in England, to contend with the perpetual
inequalities which have hardly been sufficiently recognized as
distinctive of our plains. In Italy he found the plains to be flat with
that peculiar sub-alpine flatness, and the roads straight. Most
beautiful with the mountains for a distance—but he hardly had eyes for
the mountains. It is rather difficult to forgive him for calling the
rocks and bays of the coast ‘horrid gaps’ and ‘dreadful mountains’; but
‘Oh, the sweet Paradise!’ he cries among the fountains and the vines.
His was a clear spirit. Wherever he journeyed he went upright; and if we
desire to travel with him into Italy, it is not only for the sake of his
Italy but for the sake of himself. Something we would have from him in
exchange for our better information on the ‘Gotiq ordonance’.