In Italy, if we come to that, this particular appearance is far from
being only in the streets, where we are apt most to observe it--in
countenances caught as we pass and in the objects marked by the
guide-books with their respective stellar allowances. It is behind
the walls of the houses that old, old history is thick and that the
multiplied stars of Baedeker might often best find their application.
The feast of St. John the Baptist is the feast of the year in Florence,
and it seemed to me on that night that I could have scattered about me a
handful of these signs. I had the pleasure of spending a couple of hours
on a signal high terrace that overlooks the Arno, as well as in the
galleries that open out to it, where I met more than ever the pleasant
curious question of the disparity between the old conditions and the new
manners. Make our manners, we moderns, as good as we can, there is still
no getting over it that they are not good enough for many of the great
places. This was one of those scenes, and its greatness came out to the
full into the hot Florentine evening, in which the pink and golden
fires of the pyrotechnics arranged on Ponte Carraja--the occasion of our
assembly--lighted up the large issue. The “good people” beneath were a
huge, hot, gentle, happy family; the fireworks on the bridge, kindling
river as well as sky, were delicate and charming; the terrace connected
the two wings that give bravery to the front of the palace, and the
close-hung pictures in the rooms, open in a long series, offered to a
lover of quiet perambulation an alternative hard to resist.
Wherever he stood--on the broad loggia, in the cluster of company, among
bland ejaculations and liquefied ices, or in the presence of the mixed
masters that led him from wall to wall--such a seeker for the spirit of
each occasion could only turn it over that in the first place this was
an intenser, finer little Florence than ever, and that in the second
the testimony was again wonderful to former fashions and ideas. What
did they do, in the other time, the time of so much smaller a society,
smaller and fewer fortunes, more taste perhaps as to some particulars,
but fewer tastes, at any rate, and fewer habits and wants--what did they
do with chambers so multitudinous and so vast? Put their “state” at its
highest--and we know of many ways in which it must have broken down--how
did they live in them without the aid of variety? How did they, in
minor communities in which every one knew every one, and every one’s
impression and effect had been long, as we say, discounted, find
representation and emulation sufficiently amusing? Much of the charm of
thinking of it, however, is doubtless that we are not able to say.
This leaves us with the conviction that does them most honour: the old
generations built and arranged greatly for the simple reason that they
liked it, and they could bore themselves--to say nothing of each other,
when it came to that--better in noble conditions than in mean ones.
It was not, I must add, of the far-away Florentine age that I most
thought, but of periods more recent and of which the sound and beautiful
house more directly spoke. If one had always been homesick for the
Arno-side of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, here was a
chance, and a better one than ever, to taste again of the cup. Many of
the pictures--there was a charming quarter of an hour when I had them
to myself--were bad enough to have passed for good in those delightful
years. Shades of Grand-Dukes encompassed me--Dukes of the pleasant later
sort who weren’t really grand. There was still the sense of having come
too late--yet not too late, after all, for this glimpse and this dream.
My business was to people the place--its own business had never been to
save us the trouble of understanding it. And then the deepest spell of
all was perhaps that just here I was supremely out of the way of the so
terribly actual Florentine question. This, as all the world knows, is
a battle-ground, to-day, in many journals, with all Italy practically
pulling on one side and all England, America and Germany pulling on the
other: I speak of course of the more or less articulate opinion. The
“improvement,” the rectification of Florence is in the air, and the
problem of the particular ways in which, given such desperately delicate
cases, these matters should be understood. The little treasure-city is,
if there ever was one, a delicate case--more delicate perhaps than any
other in the world save that of our taking on ourselves to persuade
the Italians that they mayn’t do as they like with their own. They so
absolutely may that I profess I see no happy issue from the fight. It
will take more tact than our combined tactful genius may at all probably
muster to convince them that their own is, by an ingenious logic, much
rather _ours_. It will take more subtlety still to muster for them that
dazzling show of examples from which they may learn that what in general
is “ours” shall appear to them as a rule a sacrifice to beauty and a
triumph of taste. The situation, to the truly analytic mind, offers in
short, to perfection, all the elements of despair; and I am afraid that
if I hung back, at the Corsini palace, to woo illusions and invoke
the irrelevant, it was because I could think, in the conditions, of no
better way to meet the acute responsibility of the critic than just to
shirk it.
{1899.}