IV

I had never known Florence more herself, or in other words more

attaching, than I found her for a week in that brilliant October.

She sat in the sunshine beside her yellow river like the little

treasure-city she has always seemed, without commerce, without other

industry than the manufacture of mosaic paper-weights and alabaster

Cupids, without actuality or energy or earnestness or any of those

rugged virtues which in most cases are deemed indispensable for civic

cohesion; with nothing but the little unaugmented stock of her mediaeval

memories, her tender-coloured mountains, her churches and palaces,

pictures and statues. There were very few strangers; one’s detested

fellow-pilgrim was infrequent; the native population itself seemed

scanty; the sound of wheels in the streets was but occasional; by eight

o’clock at night, apparently, every one had gone to bed, and the

musing wanderer, still wandering and still musing, had the place to

himself--had the thick shadow-masses of the great palaces, and the

shafts of moonlight striking the polygonal paving-stones, and the empty

bridges, and the silvered yellow of the Arno, and the stillness broken

only by a homeward step, a step accompanied by a snatch of song from a

warm Italian voice. My room at the inn looked out on the river and was

flooded all day with sunshine. There was an absurd orange-coloured

paper on the walls; the Arno, of a hue not altogether different, flowed

beneath; and on the other side of it rose a line of sallow houses, of

extreme antiquity, crumbling and mouldering, bulging and protruding over

the stream. (I seem to speak of their fronts; but what I saw was their

shabby backs, which were exposed to the cheerful flicker of the river,

while the fronts stood for ever in the deep damp shadow of a narrow

mediaeval street.) All this brightness and yellowness was a perpetual

delight; it was a part of that indefinably charming colour which

Florence always seems to wear as you look up and down at it from

the river, and from the bridges and quays. This is a kind of grave

radiance--a harmony of high tints--which I scarce know how to describe.

There are yellow walls and green blinds and red roofs, there are

intervals of brilliant brown and natural-looking blue; but the picture

is not spotty nor gaudy, thanks to the distribution of the colours in

large and comfortable masses, and to the washing-over of the scene by

some happy softness of sunshine. The river-front of Florence is in short

a delightful composition. Part of its charm comes of course from the

generous aspect of those high-based Tuscan palaces which a renewal of

acquaintance with them has again commended to me as the most dignified

dwellings in the world. Nothing can be finer than that look of giving

up the whole immense ground-floor to simple purposes of vestibule and

staircase, of court and high-arched entrance; as if this were all but

a massive pedestal for the real habitation and people weren’t properly

housed unless, to begin with, they should be lifted fifty feet above

the pavement. The great blocks of the basement; the great intervals,

horizontally and vertically, from window to window (telling of the

height and breadth of the rooms within); the armorial shield hung

forward at one of the angles; the wide-brimmed roof, overshadowing

the narrow street; the rich old browns and yellows of the walls: these

definite elements put themselves together with admirable art.

{Illustration: ROMAN GATEWAY, RIMINI.}

Take a Tuscan pile of this type out of its oblique situation in the

town; call it no longer a palace, but a villa; set it down by a terrace

on one of the hills that encircle Florence, place a row of high-waisted

cypresses beside it, give it a grassy court-yard and a view of the

Florentine towers and the valley of the Arno, and you will think it

perhaps even more worthy of your esteem. It was a Sunday noon, and

brilliantly warm, when I again arrived; and after I had looked from my

windows a while at that quietly-basking river-front I have spoken of

I took my way across one of the bridges and then out of one of the

gates--that immensely tall Roman Gate in which the space from the top of

the arch to the cornice (except that there is scarcely a cornice, it is

all a plain massive piece of wall) is as great, or seems to be, as that

from the ground to the former point. Then I climbed a steep and winding

way--much of it a little dull if one likes, being bounded by mottled,

mossy garden-walls--to a villa on a hill-top, where I found various

things that touched me with almost too fine a point. Seeing them again,

often, for a week, both by sunlight and moonshine, I never quite learned

not to covet them; not to feel that not being a part of them was somehow

to miss an exquisite chance. What a tranquil, contented life it seemed,

with romantic beauty as a part of its daily texture!--the sunny terrace,

with its tangled _podere_ beneath it; the bright grey olives against

the bright blue sky; the long, serene, horizontal lines of other villas,

flanked by their upward cypresses, disposed upon the neighbouring hills;

the richest little city in the world in a softly-scooped hollow at one’s

feet, and beyond it the most appealing of views, the most majestic,

yet the most familiar. Within the villa was a great love of art and

a painting-room full of felicitous work, so that if human life there

confessed to quietness, the quietness was mostly but that of the intent

act. A beautiful occupation in that beautiful position, what could

possibly be better? That is what I spoke just now of envying--a way

of life that doesn’t wince at such refinements of peace and ease. When

labour self-charmed presents itself in a dull or an ugly place we esteem

it, we admire it, but we scarce feel it to be the ideal of good fortune.

When, however, its votaries move as figures in an ancient, noble

landscape, and their walks and contemplations are like a turning of the

leaves of history, we seem to have before us an admirable case of virtue

made easy; meaning here by virtue contentment and concentration, a real

appreciation of the rare, the exquisite though composite, medium of

life. You needn’t want a rush or a crush when the scene itself, the mere

scene, shares with you such a wealth of consciousness.

It is true indeed that I might after a certain time grow weary of a

regular afternoon stroll among the Florentine lanes; of sitting on low

parapets, in intervals of flower-topped wall, and looking across at

Fiesole or down the rich-hued valley of the Arno; of pausing at the open

gates of villas and wondering at the height of cypresses and the depth

of loggias; of walking home in the fading light and noting on a dozen

westward-looking surfaces the glow of the opposite sunset. But for a

week or so all this was delightful. The villas are innumerable, and if

you’re an aching alien half the talk is about villas. This one has a

story; that one has another; they all look as if they had stories--none

in truth predominantly gay. Most of them are offered to rent (many of

them for sale) at prices unnaturally low; you may have a tower and a

garden, a chapel and an expanse of thirty windows, for five hundred

dollars a year. In imagination you hire three or four; you take

possession and settle and stay. Your sense of the fineness of the finest

is of something very grave and stately; your sense of the bravery of two

or three of the best something quite tragic and sinister. From what does

this latter impression come? You gather it as you stand there in the

early dusk, with your eyes on the long, pale-brown facade, the enormous

windows, the iron cages fastened to the lower ones. Part of the brooding

expression of these great houses comes, even when they have not fallen

into decay, from their look of having outlived their original use. Their

extraordinary largeness and massiveness are a satire on their present

fate. They weren’t built with such a thickness of wall and depth of

embrasure, such a solidity of staircase and superfluity of stone,

simply to afford an economical winter residence to English and American

families. I don’t know whether it was the appearance of these stony old

villas, which seemed so dumbly conscious of a change of manners, that

threw a tinge of melancholy over the general prospect; certain it is

that, having always found this note as of a myriad old sadnesses in

solution in the view of Florence, it seemed to me now particularly

strong. “Lovely, lovely, but it makes me ‘blue,’” the sensitive stranger

couldn’t but murmur to himself as, in the late afternoon, he looked

at the landscape from over one of the low parapets, and then, with his

hands in his pockets, turned away indoors to candles and dinner.

V

Below, in the city, through all frequentation of streets and churches

and museums, it was impossible not to have a good deal of the same

feeling; but here the impression was more easy to analyse. It came from

a sense of the perfect separateness of all the great productions of

the Renaissance from the present and the future of the place, from the

actual life and manners, the native ideal. I have already spoken of

the way in which the vast aggregation of beautiful works of art in the

Italian cities strikes the visitor nowadays--so far as present Italy

is concerned--as the mere stock-in-trade of an impecunious but thrifty

people. It is this spiritual solitude, this conscious disconnection of

the great works of architecture and sculpture that deposits a certain

weight upon the heart; when we see a great tradition broken we feel

something of the pain with which we hear a stifled cry. But regret

is one thing and resentment is another. Seeing one morning, in a

shop-window, the series of _Mornings in Florence_ published a few years

since by Mr. Ruskin, I made haste to enter and purchase these amusing

little books, some passages of which I remembered formerly to have

read. I couldn’t turn over many pages without observing that the

“separateness” of the new and old which I just mentioned had produced

in their author the liveliest irritation. With the more acute phases of

this condition it was difficult to sympathise, for the simple reason, it

seems to me, that it savours of arrogance to demand of any people, as

a right of one’s own, that they shall be artistic. “Be artistic

yourselves!” is the very natural reply that young Italy has at hand for

English critics and censors. When a people produces beautiful statues

and pictures it gives us something more than is set down in the bond,

and we must thank it for its generosity; and when it stops producing

them or caring for them we may cease thanking, but we hardly have a

right to begin and rail. The wreck of Florence, says Mr. Ruskin, “is now

too ghastly and heart-breaking to any human soul that remembers the days

of old”; and these desperate words are an allusion to the fact that the

little square in front of the cathedral, at the foot of Giotto’s Tower,

with the grand Baptistery on the other side, is now the resort of

a number of hackney-coaches and omnibuses. This fact is doubtless

lamentable, and it would be a hundred times more agreeable to see among

people who have been made the heirs of so priceless a work of art as the

sublime campanile some such feeling about it as would keep it free even

from the danger of defilement. A cab-stand is a very ugly and dirty

thing, and Giotto’s Tower should have nothing in common with such

conveniences. But there is more than one way of taking such things, and

the sensitive stranger who has been walking about for a week with his

mind full of the sweetness and suggestiveness of a hundred Florentine

places may feel at last in looking into Mr. Ruskin’s little tracts that,

discord for discord, there isn’t much to choose between the importunity

of the author’s personal ill-humour and the incongruity of horse-pails

and bundles of hay. And one may say this without being at all a partisan

of the doctrine of the inevitableness of new desecrations. For my own

part, I believe there are few things in this line that the new Italian

spirit isn’t capable of, and not many indeed that we aren’t destined to

see. Pictures and buildings won’t be completely destroyed, because in

that case the _forestieri_, scatterers of cash, would cease to arrive

and the turn-stiles at the doors of the old palaces and convents, with

the little patented slit for absorbing your half-franc, would grow quite

rusty, would stiffen with disuse. But it’s safe to say that the

new Italy growing into an old Italy again will continue to take her

elbow-room wherever she may find it.

{Illustration: SANTA MARIA NOVELLA, FLORENCE}

I am almost ashamed to say what I did with Mr. Ruskin’s little books. I

put them into my pocket and betook myself to Santa Maria Novella. There

I sat down and, after I had looked about for a while at the beautiful

church, drew them forth one by one and read the greater part of them.

Occupying one’s self with light literature in a great religious edifice

is perhaps as bad a piece of profanation as any of those rude dealings

which Mr. Ruskin justly deplores; but a traveller has to make the most

of odd moments, and I was waiting for a friend in whose company I was

to go and look at Giotto’s beautiful frescoes in the cloister of the

church. My friend was a long time coming, so that I had an hour with Mr.

Ruskin, whom I called just now a light _littérateur_ because in these

little Mornings in Florence he is for ever making his readers laugh.

I remembered of course where I was, and in spite of my latent hilarity

felt I had rarely got such a snubbing. I had really been enjoying the

good old city of Florence, but I now learned from Mr. Ruskin that this

was a scandalous waste of charity. I should have gone about with an

imprecation on my lips, I should have worn a face three yards long. I

had taken great pleasure in certain frescoes by Ghirlandaio in the choir

of that very church; but it appeared from one of the little books that

these frescoes were as naught. I had much admired Santa Croce and had

thought the Duomo a very noble affair; but I had now the most positive

assurance I knew nothing about them. After a while, if it was only

ill-humour that was needed for doing honour to the city of the Medici,

I felt that I had risen to a proper level; only now it was Mr. Ruskin

himself I had lost patience with, not the stupid Brunelleschi, not the

vulgar Ghirlandaio. Indeed I lost patience altogether, and asked myself

by what right this informal votary of form pretended to run riot through

a poor charmed _flaneur’s_ quiet contemplations, his attachment to the

noblest of pleasures, his enjoyment of the loveliest of cities. The

little books seemed invidious and insane, and it was only when I

remembered that I had been under no obligation to buy them that I

checked myself in repenting of having done so.

Then at last my friend arrived and we passed together out of the church,

and, through the first cloister beside it, into a smaller enclosure

where we stood a while to look at the tomb of the Marchesa

Strozzi-Ridolfi, upon which the great Giotto has painted four superb

little pictures. It was easy to see the pictures were superb; but I drew

forth one of my little books again, for I had observed that Mr. Ruskin

spoke of them. Hereupon I recovered my tolerance; for what could be

better in this case, I asked myself, than Mr. Ruskin’s remarks? They

are in fact excellent and charming--full of appreciation of the deep

and simple beauty of the great painter’s work. I read them aloud to my

companion; but my companion was rather, as the phrase is, “put off”

by them. One of the frescoes--it is a picture of the birth of the

Virgin--contains a figure coming through a door. “Of ornament,” I quote,

“there is only the entirely simple outline of the vase which the servant

carries; of colour two or three masses of sober red and pure white,

with brown and grey. That is all,” Mr. Ruskin continues. “And if you are

pleased with this you can see Florence. But if not, by all means amuse

yourself there, if you find it amusing, as long as you like; you

can never see it.” _You can never see it._ This seemed to my friend

insufferable, and I had to shuffle away the book again, so that we might

look at the fresco with the unruffled geniality it deserves. We agreed

afterwards, when in a more convenient place I read aloud a good many

more passages from the precious tracts, that there are a great many

ways of seeing Florence, as there are of seeing most beautiful and

interesting things, and that it is very dry and pedantic to say that

the happy vision depends upon our squaring our toes with a certain

particular chalk-mark. We see Florence wherever and whenever we enjoy

it, and for enjoying it we find a great many more pretexts than Mr.

Ruskin seems inclined to allow. My friend and I convinced ourselves

also, however, that the little books were an excellent purchase, on

account of the great charm and felicity of much of their incidental

criticism; to say nothing, as I hinted just now, of their being

extremely amusing. Nothing in fact is more comical than the familiar

asperity of the author’s style and the pedagogic fashion in which he

pushes and pulls his unhappy pupils about, jerking their heads toward

this, rapping their knuckles for that, sending them to stand in

corners and giving them Scripture texts to copy. But it is neither the

felicities nor the aberrations of detail, in Mr. Ruskin’s writings, that

are the main affair for most readers; it is the general tone that, as

I have said, puts them off or draws them on. For many persons he will

never bear the test of being read in this rich old Italy, where art, so

long as it really lived at all, was spontaneous, joyous, irresponsible.

If the reader is in daily contact with those beautiful Florentine

works which do still, in away, force themselves into notice through the

vulgarity and cruelty of modern profanation, it will seem to him that

this commentator’s comment is pitched in the strangest falsetto key.

“One may read a hundred pages of this sort of thing,” said my friend,

“without ever dreaming that he is talking about _art_. You can say

nothing worse about him than that.” Which is perfectly true. Art is the

one corner of human life in which we may take our ease. To justify our

presence there the only thing demanded of us is that we shall have felt

the representational impulse. In other connections our impulses are

conditioned and embarrassed; we are allowed to have only so many as

are consistent with those of our neighbours; with their convenience

and well-being, with their convictions and prejudices, their rules and

regulations. Art means an escape from all this. Wherever her shining

standard floats the need for apology and compromise is over; there it

is enough simply that we please or are pleased. There the tree is judged

only by its fruits. If these are sweet the tree is justified--and not

less so the consumer.

One may read a great many pages of Mr. Ruskin without getting a hint of

this delightful truth; a hint of the not unimportant fact that art after

all is made for us and not we for art. This idea that the value of

a work is in the amount of illusion it yields is conspicuous by its

absence. And as for Mr. Ruskin’s world’s being a place--his world of

art--where we may take life easily, woe to the luckless mortal who

enters it with any such disposition. Instead of a garden of delight, he

finds a sort of assize court in perpetual session. Instead of a place

in which human responsibilities are lightened and suspended, he finds a

region governed by a kind of Draconic legislation. His responsibilities

indeed are tenfold increased; the gulf between truth and error is for

ever yawning at his feet; the pains and penalties of this same error are

advertised, in apocalyptic terminology, upon a thousand sign-posts; and

the rash intruder soon begins to look back with infinite longing to the

lost paradise of the artless. There can be no greater want of tact in

dealing with those things with which men attempt to ornament life than

to be perpetually talking about “error.” A truce to all rigidities is

the law of the place; the only thing absolute there is that some force

and some charm have worked. The grim old bearer of the scales excuses

herself; she feels this not to be her province. Differences here are not

iniquity and righteousness; they are simply variations of temperament,

kinds of curiosity. We are not under theological government.