I
I waited in Paris until after the elections for the new Chamber (they
took place on the 14th of October); as only after one had learned that
the famous attempt of Marshal MacMahon and his ministers to drive the
French nation to the polls like a flock of huddling sheep, each with the
white ticket of an official candidate round his neck, had not achieved
the success which the energy of the process might have promised--only
then it was possible to draw a long breath and deprive the republican
party of such support as might have been conveyed in one’s sympathetic
presence. Seriously speaking too, the weather had been enchanting--there
were Italian fancies to be gathered without leaving the banks of the
Seine. Day after day the air was filled with golden light, and even
those chalkish vistas of the Parisian _beaux quartiers_ assumed the
iridescent tints of autumn. Autumn weather in Europe is often such
a very sorry affair that a fair-minded American will have it on his
conscience to call attention to a rainless and radiant October.
The echoes of the electoral strife kept me company for a while after
starting upon that abbreviated journey to Turin which, as you leave
Paris at night, in a train unprovided with encouragements to slumber, is
a singular mixture of the odious and the charming. The charming indeed
I think prevails; for the dark half of the journey is the least
interesting. The morning light ushers you into the romantic gorges
of the Jura, and after a big bowl of _cafe au lait_ at Culoz you may
compose yourself comfortably for the climax of your spectacle. The day
before leaving Paris I met a French friend who had just returned from a
visit to a Tuscan country-seat where he had been watching the vintage.
“Italy,” he said, “is more lovely than words can tell, and France,
steeped in this electoral turmoil, seems no better than a bear-garden.”
The part of the bear-garden through which you travel as you approach the
Mont Cenis seemed to me that day very beautiful. The autumn colouring,
thanks to the absence of rain, had been vivid and crisp, and the
vines that swung their low garlands between the mulberries round about
Chambery looked like long festoons of coral and amber. The frontier
station of Modane, on the further side of the Mont Cenis Tunnel, is
a very ill-regulated place; but even the most irritable of tourists,
meeting it on his way southward, will be disposed to consider it
good-naturedly. There is far too much bustling and scrambling, and the
facilities afforded you for the obligatory process of ripping open
your luggage before the officers of the Italian custom-house are
much scantier than should be; but for myself there is something that
deprecates irritation in the shabby green and grey uniforms of all the
Italian officials who stand loafing about and watching the northern
invaders scramble back into marching order. Wearing an administrative
uniform doesn’t necessarily spoil a man’s temper, as in France one is
sometimes led to believe; for these excellent under-paid Italians carry
theirs as lightly as possible, and their answers to your inquiries don’t
in the least bristle with rapiers, buttons and cockades. After leaving
Modane you slide straight downhill into the Italy of your desire; from
which point the road edges, after the grand manner, along those
It precipices that stand shoulder to shoulder, in a prodigious
perpendicular file, till they finally admit you to a distant glimpse he
ancient capital of Piedmont.
Turin is no city of a name to conjure with, and I pay an extravagant
tribute to subjective emotion in speaking of it as ancient, if the place
is less bravely peninsular than Florence and Rome, at least it is more
in the scenic tradition than New York Paris; and while I paced the great
arcades and looked at the fourth-rate shop windows I didn’t scruple to
cultivate a shameless optimism. Relatively speaking, Turin touches
a chord; but there is after all no reason in a large collection of
shabbily-stuccoed houses, disposed in a rigidly rectangular manner, for
passing a day of deep, still gaiety. The only reason, I am afraid, is
the old superstition of Italy--that property in the very look of the
written word, the evocation of a myriad images, that makes any lover of
the arts take Italian satisfactions on easier terms than any others. The
written word stands for something that eternally tricks us; we juggle
to our credulity even with such inferior apparatus as is offered to
our hand at Turin. I roamed all the morning under the tall porticoes,
thinking it sufficient joy to take note of the soft, warm air, of that
local colour of things that is at once so broken and so harmonious, and
of the comings and goings, the physiognomy and manners, of the excellent
Turinese. I had opened the old book again; the old charm was in the
style; I was in a more delightful world. I saw nothing surpassingly
beautiful or curious; but your true taster of the most seasoned of
dishes finds well-nigh the whole mixture in any mouthful. Above all on
the threshold of Italy he knows again the solid and perfectly definable
pleasure of finding himself among the traditions of the grand style in
architecture. It must be said that we have still to go there to
recover the sense of the domiciliary mass. In northern cities there are
beautiful houses, picturesque and curious houses; sculptured gables that
hang over the street, charming bay-windows, hooded doorways, elegant
proportions, a profusion of delicate ornament; but a good specimen of
an old Italian palazzo has a nobleness that is all its own. We laugh
at Italian “palaces,” at their peeling paint, their nudity, their
dreariness; but they have the great palatial quality--elevation and
extent. They make of smaller things the apparent abode of pigmies; they
round their great arches and interspace their huge windows with a proud
indifference to the cost of materials. These grand proportions--the
colossal basements, the doorways that seem meant for cathedrals, the far
away cornices--impart by contrast a humble and _bourgeois_ expression
to interiors founded on the sacrifice of the whole to the part, and
in which the air of grandeur depends largely on the help of the
upholsterer. At Turin my first feeling was really one of renewed shame
for our meaner architectural manners. If the Italians at bottom despise
the rest of mankind and regard them as barbarians, disinherited of the
tradition of form, the idea proceeds largely, no doubt, from our
living in comparative mole-hills. They alone were really to build their
civilisation.
{Illustration: UNDER THE ARCADES, TURIN.}
An impression which on coming back to Italy I find even stronger than
when it was first received is that of the contrast between the fecundity
of the great artistic period and the vulgarity there of the genius of
to-day. The first few hours spent on Italian soil are sufficient to
renew it, and the question I allude to is, historically speaking, one of
the oddest. That the people who but three hundred years ago had the best
taste in the world should now have the worst; that having produced the
noblest, loveliest, costliest works, they should now be given up to the
manufacture of objects at once ugly and paltry; that the race of which
Michael Angelo and Raphael, Leonardo and Titian were characteristic
should have no other title to distinction than third-rate _genre_
pictures and catchpenny statues--all this is a frequent perplexity to
the observer of actual Italian life. The flower of “great” art in these
latter years ceased to bloom very powerfully anywhere; but nowhere
does it seem so drooping and withered as in the shadow of the immortal
embodiments of the old Italian genius. You go into a church or a gallery
and feast your fancy upon a splendid picture or an exquisite piece of
sculpture, and on issuing from the door that has admitted you to the
beautiful past are confronted with something that has the effect of a
very bad joke. The aspect of your lodging--the carpets, the curtains,
the upholstery in general, with their crude and violent colouring and
their vulgar material--the trumpery things in the shops, the extreme
bad taste of the dress of the women, the cheapness and baseness of every
attempt at decoration in the cafes and railway-stations, the hopeless
frivolity of everything that pretends to be a work of art--all this
modern crudity runs riot over the relics of the great period.
We can do a thing for the first time but once; it is but once for all
that we can have a pleasure in its freshness. This is a law not on the
whole, I think, to be regretted, for we sometimes learn to know things
better by not enjoying them too much. It is certain, however, at the
same time, that a visitor who has worked off the immediate ferment for
this inexhaustibly interesting country has by no means entirely drained
the cup. After thinking of Italy as historical and artistic it will
do him no great harm to think of her for a while as panting both for
a future and for a balance at the bank; aspirations supposedly much
at variance with the Byronic, the Ruskinian, the artistic, poetic,
aesthetic manner of considering our eternally attaching peninsula.
He may grant--I don’t say it is absolutely necessary--that its actual
aspects and economics are ugly, prosaic, provokingly out of relation
to the diary and the album; it is nevertheless true that, at the point
things have come to, modern Italy in a manner imposes herself. I hadn’t
been many hours in the country before that truth assailed me; and I may
add that, the first irritation past, I found myself able to accept it.
For, if we think, nothing is more easy to understand than an honest ire
on the part of the young Italy of to-day at being looked at by all the
world as a kind of soluble pigment. Young Italy, preoccupied with its
economical and political future, must be heartily tired of being admired
for its eyelashes and its pose. In one of Thackeray’s novels occurs
a mention of a young artist who sent to the Royal Academy a picture
representing “A Contadino dancing with a Trasteverina at the door of a
Locanda, to the music of a Pifferaro.” It is in this attitude and with
these conventional accessories that the world has hitherto seen fit to
represent young Italy, and one doesn’t wonder that if the youth has
any spirit he should at last begin to resent our insufferable aesthetic
patronage. He has established a line of tram-cars in Rome, from
the Porta del Popolo to the Ponte Molle, and it is on one of these
democratic vehicles that I seem to see him taking his triumphant course
down the vista of the future. I won’t pretend to rejoice with him any
more than I really do; I won’t pretend, as the sentimental tourists say
about it all, as if it were the setting of an intaglio or the border of
a Roman scarf, to “like” it. Like it or not, as we may, it is evidently
destined to be; I see a new Italy in the future which in many important
respects will equal, if not surpass, the most enterprising sections of
our native land. Perhaps by that time Chicago and San Francisco will
have acquired a pose, and their sons and daughters will dance at the
doors of _locande_.
However this may be, the accomplished schism between the old order and
the new is the promptest moral of a fresh visit to this ever-suggestive
part of the world. The old has become more and more a museum, preserved
and perpetuated in the midst of the new, but without any further
relation to it--it must be admitted indeed that such a relation is
considerable--than that of the stock on his shelves to the shopkeeper,
or of the Siren of the South to the showman who stands before his booth.
More than once, as we move about nowadays in the Italian cities,
there seems to pass before our eyes a vision of the coming years. It
represents to our satisfaction an Italy united and prosperous,
but altogether scientific and commercial. The Italy indeed that we
sentimentalise and romance about was an ardently mercantile country;
though I suppose it loved not its ledgers less, but its frescoes
and altar-pieces more. Scattered through this paradise regained of
trade--this country of a thousand ports--we see a large number of
beautiful buildings in which an endless series of dusky pictures are
darkening, dampening, fading, failing, through the years. By the doors
of the beautiful buildings are little turnstiles at which there sit
a great many uniformed men to whom the visitor pays a tenpenny fee.
Inside, in the vaulted and frescoed chambers, the art of Italy lies
buried as in a thousand mausoleums. It is well taken care of; it is
constantly copied; sometimes it is “restored”--as in the case of that
beautiful boy-figure of Andrea del Sarto at Florence, which may be seen
at the gallery of the Uffizi with its honourable duskiness quite peeled
off and heaven knows what raw, bleeding cuticle laid bare. One evening
lately, near the same Florence, in the soft twilight, I took a stroll
among those encircling hills on which the massive villas are mingled
with the vaporous olives. Presently I arrived where three roads met at a
wayside shrine, in which, before some pious daub of an old-time Madonna,
a little votive lamp glimmered through the evening air. The hour,
the atmosphere, the place, the twinkling taper, the sentiment of the
observer, the thought that some one had been rescued here from an
assassin or from some other peril and had set up a little grateful altar
in consequence, against the yellow-plastered wall of a tangled _podere_;
all this led me to approach the shrine with a reverent, an emotional
step. I drew near it, but after a few steps I paused. I became aware of
an incongruous odour; it seemed to me that the evening air was charged
with a perfume which, although to a certain extent familiar, had not
hitherto associated itself with rustic frescoes and wayside altars. I
wondered, I gently sniffed, and the question so put left me no doubt.
The odour was that of petroleum; the votive taper was nourished with
the essence of Pennsylvania. I confess that I burst out laughing, and a
picturesque contadino, wending his homeward way in the dusk, stared at
me as if I were an iconoclast. He noticed the petroleum only, I imagine,
to snuff it fondly up; but to me the thing served as a symbol of the
Italy of the future. There is a horse-car from the Porta del Popolo to
the Ponte Molle, and the Tuscan shrines are fed with kerosene.