Your truly sentimental tourist will never take it from any occasion that
there is absolutely nothing for him, and it was at Chambéry--but four
hours from Geneva--that I accepted the situation and decided there
might be mysterious delights in entering Italy by a whizz through an
eight-mile tunnel, even as a bullet through the bore of a gun. I found
my reward in the Savoyard landscape, which greets you betimes with the
smile of anticipation. If it is not so Italian as Italy it is at least
more Italian than anything _but_ Italy--more Italian, too, I should
think, than can seem natural and proper to the swarming red-legged
soldiery who so publicly proclaim it of the empire of M. Thiers. The
light and the complexion of things had to my eyes not a little of that
mollified depth last loved by them rather further on. It was simply
perhaps that the weather was hot and the mountains drowsing in that
iridescent haze that I have seen nearer home than at Chambéry. But the
vegetation, assuredly, had an all but Transalpine twist and curl, and
the classic wayside tangle of corn and vines left nothing to be desired
in the line of careless grace. Chambéry as a town, however, constitutes
no foretaste of the monumental cities. There is shabbiness and
shabbiness, the fond critic of such things will tell you; and that of
the ancient capital of Savoy lacks style. I found a better pastime,
however, than strolling through the dark dull streets in quest of
effects that were not forthcoming. The first urchin you meet will
show you the way to Les Charmettes and the Maison Jean-Jacques. A
very pleasant way it becomes as soon as it leaves the town--a winding,
climbing by-road, bordered with such a tall and sturdy hedge as to
give it the air of an English lane--if you can fancy an English lane
introducing you to the haunts of a Madame de Warens.
The house that formerly sheltered this lady’s singular ménage stands on
a hillside above the road, which a rapid path connects with the little
grass-grown terrace before it. It is a small shabby, homely dwelling,
with a certain reputable solidity, however, and more of internal
spaciousness than of outside promise. The place is shown by an elderly
competent dame who points out the very few surviving objects which you
may touch with the reflection--complacent in whatsoever degree suits
you--that they have known the familiarity of Rousseau’s hand. It was
presumably a meagrely-appointed house, and I wondered that on such
scanty features so much expression should linger. But the structure has
an ancient ponderosity, and the dust of the eighteenth century seems
to lie on its worm-eaten floors, to cling to the faded old _papiers à
ramages_ on the walls and to lodge in the crevices of the brown wooden
ceilings. Madame de Warens’s bed remains, with the narrow couch of
Jean-Jacques as well, his little warped and cracked yellow spinet, and
a battered, turnip-shaped silver timepiece, engraved with its master’s
name--its primitive tick as extinct as his passionate heart-beats. It
cost me, I confess, a somewhat pitying acceleration of my own to see
this intimately personal relic of the _genius loci_--for it had dwelt;
in his waistcoat-pocket, than which there is hardly a material point
in space nearer to a man’s consciousness--tossed so the dog’s-eared
visitors’ record or _livre de cuisine_ recently denounced by Madame
George Sand. In fact the place generally, in so far as some faint
ghostly presence of its famous inmates seems to linger there, is by no
means exhilarating. Coppet and Ferney tell, if not of pure happiness, at
least of prosperity and, honour, wealth and success. But Les Charmettes
is haunted by ghosts unclean and forlorn. The place tells of poverty,
perversity, distress. A good deal of clever modern talent in France has
been employed in touching up the episode of which it was the scene and
tricking it out in idyllic love-knots. But as I stood on the charming
terrace I have mentioned--a little jewel of a terrace, with grassy flags
and a mossy parapet, and an admirable view of great swelling violet
hills--stood there reminded how much sweeter Nature is than man, the
story looked rather wan and unlovely beneath these literary decorations,
and I could pay it no livelier homage than is implied in perfect pity.
Hero and heroine have become too much creatures of history to take up
attitudes as part of any poetry. But, not to moralise too sternly for
a tourist between trains, I should add that, as an illustration, to be
inserted mentally in the text of the “Confessions,” a glimpse of Les
Charmettes is pleasant enough. It completes the rare charm of good
autobiography to behold with one’s eyes the faded and battered
background of the story; and Rousseau’s narrative is so incomparably
vivid and forcible that the sordid little house at Chambéry seems of
a hardly deeper shade of reality than so many other passages of his
projected truth.
If I spent an hour at Les Charmettes, fumbling thus helplessly with
the past, I recognised on the morrow how strongly the Mont Cenis Tunnel
smells of the time to come. As I passed along the Saint-Gothard highway
a couple of months since, I perceived, half up the Swiss ascent, a group
of navvies at work in a gorge beneath the road. They had laid bare a
broad surface of granite and had punched in the centre of it a round
black cavity, of about the dimensions, as it seemed to me, of a
soup-plate. This was to attain its perfect development some eight years
hence. The Mont Cenis may therefore be held to have set a fashion which
will be followed till the highest Himalaya is but the ornamental apex or
snow-capped gable-tip of some resounding fuliginous corridor. The tunnel
differs but in length from other tunnels; you spend half an hour in it.
But you whirl out into the blest peninsula, and as you look back seem to
see the mighty mass shrug its shoulders over the line, the mere turn
of a dreaming giant in his sleep. The tunnel is certainly not a poetic
object, out there is no perfection without its beauty; and as you
measure the long rugged outline of the pyramid of which it forms the
base you accept it as the perfection of a short cut. Twenty-four hours
from Paris to Turin is speed for the times--speed which may content us,
at any rate, until expansive Berlin has succeeded in placing itself at
thirty-six from Milan.
To enter Turin then of a lovely August afternoon was to find a city of
arcades, of pink and yellow stucco, of innumerable cafes, of blue-legged
officers, of ladies draped in the North-Italian mantilla. An old friend
of Italy coming back to her finds an easy waking for dormant memories.
Every object is a reminder and every reminder a thrill. Half an hour
after my arrival, as I stood at my window, which overhung the great
square, I found the scene, within and without, a rough epitome of every
pleasure and every impression I had formerly gathered from Italy: the
balcony and the Venetian-blind, the cool floor of speckled concrete, the
lavish delusions of frescoed wall and ceiling, the broad divan framed
for the noonday siesta, the massive medieval Castello in mid-piazza,
with its shabby rear and its pompous Palladian front, the brick
campaniles beyond, the milder, yellower light, the range of colour, the
suggestion of sound. Later, beneath the arcades, I found many an
old acquaintance: beautiful officers, resplendent, slow-strolling,
contemplative of female beauty; civil and peaceful dandies, hardly less
gorgeous, with that religious faith in moustache and shirt-front which
distinguishes the _belle jeunesse of Italy_; ladies with heads artfully
shawled in Spanish-looking lace, but with too little art--or too much
nature at least--in the region of the bodice; well-conditioned young
_abbati_ with neatly drawn stockings. These indeed are not objects of
first-rate interest, and with such Turin is rather meagrely furnished.
It has no architecture, no churches, no monuments, no romantic
street-scenery. It has the great votive temple of the Superga, which
stands on a high hilltop above the city, gazing across at Monte Rosa and
lifting its own fine dome against the sky with no contemptible art. But
when you have seen the Superga from the quay beside the Po, a skein of a
few yellow threads in August, despite its frequent habit of rising high
and running wild, and said to yourself that in architecture position
is half the battle, you have nothing left to visit but the Museum of
pictures. The Turin Gallery, which is large and well arranged, is the
fortunate owner of three or four masterpieces: a couple of magnificent
Vandycks and a couple of Paul Veroneses; the latter a Queen of Sheba
and a Feast of the House of Levi--the usual splendid combination of
brocades, grandees and marble colonnades dividing those skies _de
turquoise malade_ to which Théophile Gautier is fond of alluding. The
Veroneses are fine, but with Venice in prospect the traveller feels at
liberty to keep his best attention in reserve. If, however, he has the
proper relish for Vandyck, let him linger long and fondly here; for
that admiration will never be more potently stirred than by the adorable
group of the three little royal highnesses, sons and the daughter
of Charles I. All the purity of childhood is here, and all its soft
solidity of structure, rounded tenderly beneath the spangled satin and
contrasted charmingly with the pompous rigidity. Clad respectively in
crimson, white and blue, these small scions stand up in their ruffs and
fardingales in dimpled serenity, squaring their infantine stomachers at
the spectator with an innocence, a dignity, a delightful grotesqueness,
which make the picture a thing of close truth as well as of fine
decorum. You might kiss their hands, but you certainly would think twice
before pinching their cheeks--provocative as they are of this tribute of
admiration--and would altogether lack presumption to lift them off
the ground or the higher level or dais on which they stand so sturdily
planted by right of birth. There is something inimitable in the paternal
gallantry with which the painter has touched off the young lady. She was
a princess, yet she was a baby, and he has contrived, we let ourselves
fancy, to interweave an intimation that she was a creature whom, in her
teens, the lucklessly smitten--even as he was prematurely--must vainly
sigh for. Though the work is a masterpiece of execution its merits under
this head may be emulated, at a distance; the lovely modulations of
colour in the three contrasted and harmonised little satin petticoats,
the solidity of the little heads, in spite of all their prettiness, the
happy, unexaggerated squareness and maturity of _pose_, are, severally,
points to study, to imitate, and to reproduce with profit. But the taste
of such a consummate thing is its great secret as well as its great
merit--a taste which seems one of the lost instincts of mankind. Go and
enjoy this supreme expression of Vandyck’s fine sense, and admit that
never was a politer production.
Milan speaks to us of a burden of felt life of which Turin is innocent,
but in its general aspect still lingers a northern reserve which makes
the place rather perhaps the last of the prose capitals than the first
of the poetic. The long Austrian occupation perhaps did something
to Germanise its physiognomy; though indeed this is an indifferent
explanation when one remembers how well, temperamentally speaking, Italy
held her own in Venetia. Milan, at any rate, if not bristling with the
æsthetic impulse, opens to us frankly enough the thick volume of her
past. Of that volume the Cathedral is the fairest and fullest page--a
structure not supremely interesting, not logical, not even, to some
minds, commandingly beautiful, but grandly curious and superbly rich. I
hope, for my own part, never to grow too particular to admire it. If
it had no other distinction it would still have that of impressive,
immeasurable achievement. As I strolled beside its vast indented base
one evening, and felt it, above me, rear its grey mysteries into the
starlight while the restless human tide on which I floated rose no
higher than the first few layers of street-soiled marble, I was tempted
to believe that beauty in great architecture is almost a secondary
merit, and that the main point is mass--such mass as may make it a
supreme embodiment of vigorous effort. Viewed in this way a great
building is the greatest conceivable work of art. More than any other
it represents difficulties mastered, resources combined, labour, courage
and patience. And there are people who tell us that art has nothing to
do with morality! Little enough, doubtless, when it is concerned,
even ever so little, in painting the roof of Milan Cathedral within
to represent carved stone-work. Of this famous roof every one has
heard--how good it is, how bad, how perfect a delusion, how transparent
an artifice. It is the first thing your cicerone shows you on entering
the church. The occasionally accommodating art-lover may accept it
philosophically, I think; for the interior, though admirably effective
as a whole, has no great sublimity, nor even purity, of pitch. It
is splendidly vast and dim; the altarlamps twinkle afar through the
incense-thickened air like foglights at sea, and the great columns rise
straight to the roof, which hardly curves to meet them, with the girth
and altitude of oaks of a thousand years; but there is little refinement
of design--few of those felicities of proportion which the eye caresses,
when it finds them, very much as the memory retains and repeats some
happy lines of poetry or some haunting musical phrase. Consistently
brave, none the less, is the result produced, and nothing braver than a
certain exhibition that I privately enjoyed of the relics of St.
Charles Borromeus. This holy man lies at his eternal rest in a small but
gorgeous sepulchral chapel, beneath the boundless pavement and before
the high altar; and for the modest sum of five francs you may have his
shrivelled mortality unveiled and gaze at it with whatever reserves
occur to you. The Catholic Church never renounces a chance of the
sublime for fear of a chance of the ridiculous--especially when the
chance of the sublime may be the very excellent chance of five francs.
The performance in question, of which the good San Carlo paid in the
first instance the cost, was impressive certainly, but as a monstrous
matter or a grim comedy may still be. The little sacristan, having
secured his audience, whipped on a white tunic over his frock, lighted a
couple of extra candles and proceeded to remove from above the altar,
by means of a crank, a sort of sliding shutter, just as you may see
a shop-boy do of a morning at his master’s window. In this case too a
large sheet of plate-glass was uncovered, and to form an idea of the
_étalage_ you must imagine that a jeweller, for reasons of his own, has
struck an unnatural partnership with an undertaker. The black mummified
corpse of the saint is stretched out in a glass coffin, clad in his
mouldering canonicals, mitred, crosiered and gloved, glittering with
votive jewels. It is an extraordinary mixture of death and life; the
desiccated clay, the ashen rags, the hideous little black mask and
skull, and the living, glowing, twinkling splendour of diamonds,
emeralds and sapphires. The collection is really fine, and many great
historic names are attached to the different offerings. Whatever may be
the better opinion as to the future of the Church, I can’t help thinking
she will make a figure in the world so long as she retains this
great fund of precious “properties,” this prodigious capital
decoratively invested and scintillating throughout Christendom at
effectively-scattered points. You see I am forced to agree after all, in
spite of the sliding shutter and the profane swagger of the sacristan,
that a certain pastoral majesty saved the situation, or at least made
irony gape. Yet it was from a natural desire to breathe a sweeter air
that I immediately afterwards undertook the interminable climb to the
roof of the cathedral. This is another world of wonders, and one which
enjoys due renown, every square inch of wall on the winding stairways
being bescribbled with a traveller’s name. There is a great glare from
the far-stretching slopes of marble, a confusion (like the masts of a
navy or the spears of an army) of image-capped pinnacles, biting the
impalpable blue, and, better than either, the goodliest view of level
Lombardy sleeping in its rich transalpine light and resembling, with its
white-walled dwellings and the spires on its horizon, a vast green sea
spotted with ships. After two months of Switzerland the Lombard plain is
a rich rest to the eye, and the yellow, liquid, free-flowing light--as
if on favoured Italy the vessels of heaven were more widely opened--had
for mine a charm which made me think of a great opaque mountain as a
blasphemous invasion of the atmospheric spaces.
{Illustration: THE SIMPLON GATE, MILAN}
I have mentioned the cathedral first, but the prime treasure of Milan at
the present hour is the beautiful, tragical Leonardo. The cathedral is
good for another thousand years, but we ask whether our children will
find in the most majestic and most luckless of frescoes much more than
the shadow of a shadow. Its fame has been for a century or two that, as
one may say, of an illustrious invalid whom people visit to see how
he lasts, with leave-taking sighs and almost death-bed or tiptoe
precautions. The picture needs not another scar or stain, now, to be the
saddest work of art in the world; and battered, defaced, ruined as it
is, it remains one of the greatest. We may really compare its anguish
of decay to the slow conscious ebb of life in a human organism. The
production of the prodigy was a breath from the infinite, and the
painter’s conception not immeasurably less complex than the scheme, say,
of his own mortal constitution. There has been much talk lately of the
irony of fate, but I suspect fate was never more ironical than when she
led the most scientific, the most calculating of all painters to spend
fifteen long years in building his goodly house upon the sand. And yet,
after all, may not the playing of that trick represent but a deeper
wisdom, since if the thing enjoyed the immortal health and bloom of a
first-rate Titian we should have lost one of the most pertinent lessons
in the history of art? We know it as hearsay, but here is the plain
proof, that there is no limit to the amount of “stuff” an artist may put
into his work. Every painter ought once in his life to stand before the
Cenacolo and decipher its moral. Mix with your colours and mess on your
palette every particle of the very substance of your soul, and this lest
perchance your “prepared surface” shall play you a trick! Then, and then
only, it will fight to the last--it will resist even in death. Raphael
was a happier genius; you look at his lovely “Marriage of the Virgin” at
the Brera, beautiful as some first deep smile of conscious inspiration,
but to feel that he foresaw no complaint against fate, and that he knew
the world he wanted to know and charmed it into never giving him away.
But I have left no space to speak of the Brera, nor of that paradise
of book-worms with an eye for their background--if such creatures
exist--the Ambrosian Library; nor of that mighty basilica of St.
Ambrose, with its spacious atrium and its crudely solemn mosaics, in
which it is surely your own fault if you don’t forget Dr. Strauss and M.
Renan and worship as grimly as a Christian of the ninth century.
It is part of the sordid prose of the Mont Cenis road that, unlike those
fine old unimproved passes, the Simplon, the Splügen and--yet awhile
longer--the Saint-Gothard, it denies you a glimpse of that paradise
adorned by the four lakes even as that of uncommented Scripture by
the rivers of Eden. I made, however, an excursion to the Lake of Como,
which, though brief, lasted long enough to suggest to me that I too was
a hero of romance with leisure for a love-affair, and not a hurrying
tourist with a Bradshaw in his pocket. The Lake of Como has figured
largely in novels of “immoral” tendency--being commonly the spot to
which inflamed young gentlemen invite the wives of other gentlemen to
fly with them and ignore the restrictions of public opinion. But even
the Lake of Como has been revised and improved; the fondest prejudices
yield to time; it gives one somehow a sense of an aspiringly high tone.
I should pay a poor compliment at least to the swarming inmates of the
hotels which now alternate attractively by the water-side with villas
old and new were I to read the appearances more cynically. But if it is
lost to florid fiction it still presents its blue bosom to most other
refined uses, and the unsophisticated tourist, the American at least,
may do any amount of private romancing there. The pretty hotel at
Cadenabbia offers him, for instance, in the most elegant and assured
form, the so often precarious adventure of what he calls at home summer
board. It is all so unreal, so fictitious, so elegant and idle, so
framed to undermine a rigid sense of the chief end of man not being to
float for ever in an ornamental boat, beneath an awning tasselled like
a circus-horse, impelled by an affable Giovanni or Antonio from one
stately stretch of lake-laved villa steps to another, that departure
seems as harsh and unnatural as the dream-dispelling note of some
punctual voice at your bedside on a dusky winter morning. Yet I
wondered, for my own part, where I had seen it all before--the
pink-walled villas gleaming through their shrubberies of orange and
oleander, the mountains shimmering in the hazy light like so many
breasts of doves, the constant presence of the melodious Italian voice.
Where indeed but at the Opera when the manager has been more than
usually regardless of expense? Here in the foreground was the palace of
the nefarious barytone, with its banqueting-hall opening as freely on
the stage as a railway buffet on the platform; beyond, the delightful
back scene, with its operatic gamut of colouring; in the middle the
scarlet-sashed _barcaiuoli_, grouped like a chorus, hat in hand,
awaiting the conductor’s signal. It was better even than being in a
novel--this being, this fairly wallowing, in a libretto.