One day in midwinter, some years since, during a journey from Rome
to Florence perforce too rapid to allow much wayside sacrifice to
curiosity, I waited for the train at Narni. There was time to stroll
far enough from the station to have a look at the famous old bridge
of Augustus, broken short off in mid-Tiber. While I stood admiring the
measure of impression was made to overflow by the gratuitous grace of a
white-cowled monk who came trudging up the road that wound to the gate
of the town. Narni stood, in its own presented felicity, on a hill a
good space away, boxed in behind its perfect grey wall, and the monk,
to oblige me, crept slowly along and disappeared within the aperture.
Everything was distinct in the clear air, and the view exactly as like
the bit of background by an Umbrian master as it ideally should have
been. The winter is bare and brown enough in southern Italy and the
earth reduced to more of a mere anatomy than among ourselves, for whom
the very _crânerie_ of its exposed state, naked and unashamed, gives it
much of the robust serenity, not of a fleshless skeleton, but of a fine
nude statue. In these regions at any rate, the tone of the air, for
the eye, during the brief desolation, has often an extraordinary charm:
nature still smiles as with the deputed and provisional charity of
colour and light, the duty of not ceasing to cheer man’s heart. Her
whole behaviour, at the time, cast such a spell on the broken bridge,
the little walled town and the trudging friar, that I turned away with
the impatient vow and the fond vision of how I would take the journey
again and pause to my heart’s content at Narni, at Spoleto, at Assisi,
at Perugia, at Cortona, at Arezzo. But we have generally to clip our
vows a little when we come to fulfil them; and so it befell that when my
blest springtime arrived I had to begin as resignedly as possible, yet
with comparative meagreness, at Assisi.
{Illustration: ASSISI.}
I suppose enjoyment would have a simple zest which it often lacks if
we always did things at the moment we want to, for it’s mostly when
we can’t that we’re thoroughly sure we _would_, and we can answer too
little for moods in the future conditional. Winter at least seemed to me
to have put something into these seats of antiquity that the May sun
had more or less melted away--a desirable strength of tone, a depth
upon depth of queerness and quaintness. Assisi had been in the January
twilight, after my mere snatch at Narni, a vignette out of some brown
old missal. But you’ll have to be a fearless explorer now to find of a
fine spring day any such cluster of curious objects as doesn’t seem made
to match before anything else Mr. Baedeker’s polyglot estimate of its
chief recommendations. This great man was at Assisi in force, and a
brand-new inn for his accommodation has just been opened cheek by
jowl with the church of St. Francis. I don’t know that even the dire
discomfort of this harbourage makes it seem less impertinent; but I
confess I sought its protection, and the great view seemed hardly less
beautiful from my window than from the gallery of the convent. This
view embraces the whole wide reach of Umbria, which becomes as twilight
deepens a purple counterfeit of the misty sea. The visitor’s first
errand is with the church; and it’s fair furthermore to admit that when
he has crossed that threshold the position and quality of his hotel
cease for the time to be matters of moment. This two-fold temple of St.
Francis is one of the very sacred places of Italy, and it would be
hard to breathe anywhere an air more heavy with holiness. Such seems
especially the case if you happen thus to have come from Rome, where
everything ecclesiastical is, in aspect, so very much of this world--so
florid, so elegant, so full of accommodations and excrescences. The mere
site here makes for authority, and they were brave builders who laid the
foundation-stones. The thing rises straight from a steep mountain-side
and plunges forward on its great substructure of arches even as a
crowned headland may frown over the main. Before it stretches a long,
grassy piazza, at the end of which you look up a small grey street, to
see it first climb a little way the rest of the hill and then pause
and leave a broad green slope, crested, high in the air, with a ruined
castle. When I say before it I mean before the upper church; for by
way of doing something supremely handsome and impressive the sturdy
architects of the thirteenth century piled temple upon temple and
bequeathed a double version of their idea. One may imagine them to have
intended perhaps an architectural image of the relation between heart
and head. Entering the lower church at the bottom of the great flight
of steps which leads from the upper door, you seem to push at least into
the very heart of Catholicism.
For the first minutes after leaving the clearer gloom you catch nothing
but a vista of low black columns closed by the great fantastic cage
surrounding the altar, which is thus placed, by your impression, in
a sort of gorgeous cavern. Gradually you distinguish details, become
accustomed to the penetrating chill, and even manage to make out a
few frescoes; but the general effect remains splendidly sombre and
subterranean. The vaulted roof is very low and the pillars dwarfish,
though immense in girth, as befits pillars supporting substantially a
cathedral. The tone of the place is a triumph of mystery, the richest
harmony of lurking shadows and dusky corners, all relieved by scattered
images and scintillations. There was little light but what came through
the windows of the choir over which the red curtains had been dropped
and were beginning to glow with the downward sun. The choir was guarded
by a screen behind which a dozen venerable voices droned vespers; but
over the top of the screen came the heavy radiance and played among the
ornaments of the high fence round the shrine, casting the shadow of the
whole elaborate mass forward into the obscured nave. The darkness of
vaults and side-chapels is overwrought with vague frescoes, most of them
by Giotto and his school, out of which confused richness the terribly
distinct little faces characteristic of these artists stare at you with
a solemn formalism. Some are faded and injured, and many so ill-lighted
and ill-placed that you can only glance at them with decent conjecture;
the great group, however--four paintings by Giotto on the ceiling above
the altar--may be examined with some success. Like everything of that
grim and beautiful master they deserve examination; but with the effect
ever of carrying one’s appreciation in and in, as it were, rather than
of carrying it out and out, off and off, as happens for us with those
artists who have been helped by the process of “evolution” to grow
wings. This one, “going in” for emphasis at any price, stamps hard, as
who should say, on the very spot of his idea--thanks to which fact
he has a concentration that has never been surpassed. He was in other
words, in proportion to his means, a genius supremely expressive; he
makes the very shade of an intended meaning or a represented attitude so
unmistakable that his figures affect us at moments as creatures all
too suddenly, too alarmingly, too menacingly met. Meagre, primitive,
undeveloped, he yet is immeasurably strong; he even suggests that if he
had lived the due span of years later Michael Angelo might have found
a rival. Not that he is given, however, to complicated postures or
superhuman flights. The something strange that troubles and haunts us in
his work springs rather from a kind of fierce familiarity.
It is part of the wealth of the lower church that it contains an
admirable primitive fresco by an artist of genius rarely encountered,
Pietro Cavallini, pupil of Giotto. This represents the Crucifixion; the
three crosses rising into a sky spotted with the winged heads of angels
while a dense crowd presses below. You will nowhere see anything more
direfully lugubrious, or more approaching for direct force, though not
of course for amplitude of style, Tintoretto’s great renderings of the
scene in Venice. The abject anguish of the crucified and the straddling
authority and brutality of the mounted guards in the foreground are
contrasted in a fashion worthy of a great dramatist. But the most
poignant touch is the tragic grimaces of the little angelic heads that
fall like hailstones through the dark air. It is genuine realistic
weeping, the act of irrepressible “crying,” that the painter has
depicted, and the effect is pitiful at the same time as grotesque. There
are many more frescoes besides; all the chapels on one side are
lined with them, but these are chiefly interesting in their general
impressiveness--as they people the dim recesses with startling
presences, with apparitions out of scale. Before leaving the place I
lingered long near the door, for I was sure I shouldn’t soon again enjoy
such a feast of scenic composition. The opposite end glowed with subdued
colour; the middle portion was vague and thick and brown, with two or
three scattered worshippers looming through the obscurity; while, all
the way down, the polished pavement, its uneven slabs glittering dimly
in the obstructed light, was of the very essence of expensive picture.
It is certainly desirable, if one takes the lower church of St. Francis
to represent the human heart, that one should find a few bright places
there. But if the general effect is of brightness terrorised and
smothered, is the symbol less valid? For the contracted, prejudiced,
passionate heart let it stand.
One thing at all events we can say, that we should rejoice to boast as
capacious, symmetrical and well-ordered a head as the upper sanctuary.
Thanks to these merits, in spite of a brave array of Giottesque work
which has the advantage of being easily seen, it lacks the great
character of its counterpart. The frescoes, which are admirable,
represent certain leading events in the life of St. Francis, and
suddenly remind you, by one of those anomalies that are half the secret
of the consummate _mise-en-scene_ of Catholicism, that the apostle of
beggary, the saint whose only tenement in life was the ragged robe which
barely covered him, is the hero of this massive structure. Church upon
church, nothing less will adequately shroud his consecrated clay. The
great reality of Giotto’s designs adds to the helpless wonderment with
which we feel the passionate pluck of the Hero, the sense of being
separated from it by an impassable gulf, the reflection on all that has
come and gone to make morality at that vertiginous pitch impossible.
There are no such high places of humility left to climb to. An observant
friend who has lived long in Italy lately declared to me, however, that
she detested the name of this moralist, deeming him chief propagator of
the Italian vice most trying to the would-be lover of the people, the
want of personal self-respect. There is a solidarity in the use of soap,
and every cringing beggar, idler, liar and pilferer flourished for her
under the shadow of the great Francisan indifference to it. She was
possibly right; at Rome, at Naples, I might have admitted she was right;
but at Assisi, face to face with Giotto’s vivid chronicle, we admire too
much in its main subject the exquisite play of that subject’s genius--we
don’t remit to him, and this for very envy, a single throb of his
consciousness. It took in, that human, that divine embrace, everything
_but_ soap.
I should find it hard to give an orderly account of my next adventures
or impressions at Assisi, which could n’t well be anything more than
mere romantic _flanerie_. One may easily plead as the final result of
a meditation at the shrine of St. Francis a great and even an amused
charity. This state of mind led me slowly up and down for a couple of
hours through the steep little streets, and at last stretched itself
on the grass with me in the shadow of the great ruined castle that
decorates so grandly the eminence above the town. I remember edging
along the sunless side of the small mouldy houses and pausing very often
to look at nothing in particular. It was all very hot, very hushed, very
resignedly but very persistently old. A wheeled vehicle in such a place
is an event, and the _forestiero’s_ interrogative tread in the blank
sonorous lanes has the privilege of bringing the inhabitants to their
doorways. Some of the better houses, however, achieve a sombre stillness
that protests against the least curiosity as to what may happen in any
such century as this. You wonder, as you pass, what lingering old-world
social types vegetate there, but you won’t find out; albeit that in one
very silent little street I had a glimpse of an open door which I have
not forgotten. A long-haired peddler who must have been a Jew, and who
yet carried without prejudice a burden of mass-books and rosaries, was
offering his wares to a stout old priest. The priest had opened the
door rather stingily and appeared half-heartedly to dismiss him. But
the peddler held up something I couldn’t see; the priest wavered with a
timorous concession to profane curiosity and then furtively pulled the
agent of sophistication, or whatever it might be, into the house. I
should have liked to enter with that worthy.
I saw later some gentlemen of Assisi who also seemed bored enough to
have found entertainment in his tray. They were at the door of the cafe
on the Piazza, and were so thankful to me for asking them the way to the
cathedral that, answering all in chorus, they lighted up with smiles as
sympathetic as if I had done them a favour. Of that type were my mild,
my delicate adventures. The Piazza has a fine old portico of an ancient
Temple of Minerva--six fluted columns and a pediment, of beautiful
proportions, but sadly battered and decayed. Goethe, I believe, found it
much more interesting than the mighty mediaeval church, and Goethe, as a
cicerone, doubtless could have persuaded one that it was so; but in the
humble society of Murray we shall most of us find a richer sense in the
later monument. I found quaint old meanings enough in the dark yellow
facade of the small cathedral as I sat on a stone bench by the oblong
green stretched before it. This is a pleasing piece of Italian Gothic
and, like several of its companions at Assisi, has an elegant wheel
window and a number of grotesque little carvings of creatures human
and bestial. If with Goethe I were to balance anything against the
attractions of the double church I should choose the ruined castle
on the hill above the town. I had been having glimpses of it all the
afternoon at the end of steep street-vistas, and promising myself
half-an-hour beside its grey walls at sunset. The sun was very late
setting, and my half-hour became a long lounge in the lee of an abutment
which arrested the gentle uproar of the wind. The castle is a splendid
piece of ruin, perched on the summit of the mountain to whose slope
Assisi clings and dropping a pair of stony arms to enclose the little
town in its embrace. The city wall, in other words, straggles up the
steep green hill and meets the crumbling skeleton of the fortress. On
the side off from the town the mountain plunges into a deep ravine, the
opposite face of which is formed by the powerful undraped shoulder of
Monte Subasio, a fierce reflector of the sun. Gorge and mountain are
wild enough, but their frown expires in the teeming softness of the
great vale of Umbria. To lie aloft there on the grass, with silver-grey
ramparts at one’s back and the warm rushing wind in one’s ears, and
watch the beautiful plain mellow into the tones of twilight, was as
exquisite a form of repose as ever fell to a tired tourist’s lot.
{Illustration: PERUGIA.}
Perugia too has an ancient stronghold, which one must speak of in
earnest as that unconscious humorist the classic American traveller
is supposed invariably to speak of the Colosseum: it will be a very
handsome building when it’s finished. Even Perugia is going the way of
all Italy--straightening out her streets, preparing her ruins, laying
her venerable ghosts. The castle is being completely _remis a neuf_--a
Massachusetts schoolhouse could n’t cultivate a “smarter” ideal. There
are shops in the basement and fresh putty on all the windows; so
that the only thing proper to a castle it has kept is its magnificent
position and range, which you may enjoy from the broad platform where
the Perugini assemble at eventide. Perugia is chiefly known to fame as
the city of Raphael’s master; but it has a still higher claim to renown
and ought to figure in the gazetteer of fond memory as the little City
of the infinite View. The small dusky, crooked place tries by a hundred
prompt pretensions, immediate contortions, rich mantling flushes and
other ingenuities, to waylay your attention and keep it at home; but
your consciousness, alert and uneasy from the first moment, is all
abroad even when your back is turned to the vast alternative or when
fifty house-walls conceal it, and you are for ever rushing up by-streets
and peeping round corners in the hope of another glimpse or reach of it.
As it stretches away before you in that eminent indifference to limits
which is at the same time at every step an eminent homage to style, it
is altogether too free and fair for compasses and terms. You can only
say, and rest upon it, that you prefer it to any other visible fruit of
position or claimed empire of the eye that you are anywhere likely to
enjoy.
For it is such a wondrous mixture of blooming plain and gleaming river
and wavily-multitudinous mountain vaguely dotted with pale grey cities,
that, placed as you are, roughly speaking, in the centre of Italy, you
all but span the divine peninsula from sea to sea. Up the long vista
of the Tiber you look--almost to Rome; past Assisi, Spello, Foligno,
Spoleto, all perched on their respective heights and shining through the
violet haze. To the north, to the east, to the west, you see a hundred
variations of the prospect, of which I have kept no record. Two
notes only I have made: one--though who hasn’t made it over and over
again?--on the exquisite elegance of mountain forms in this endless play
of the excrescence, it being exactly as if there were variation of sex
in the upheaved mass, with the effect here mainly of contour and curve
and complexion determined in the feminine sense. It further came home to
me that the command of such an outlook on the world goes far, surely, to
give authority and centrality and experience, those of the great seats
of dominion, even to so scant a cluster of attesting objects as here. It
must deepen the civic consciousness and take off the edge of ennui.
It performs this kindly office, at any rate, for the traveller who
may overstay his curiosity as to Perugino and the Etruscan relics. It
continually solicits his wonder and praise--it reinforces the historic
page. I spent a week in the place, and when it was gone I had had enough
of Perugino, but had n’t had enough of the View.
I should perhaps do the reader a service by telling him just how a week
at Perugia may be spent. His first care must be to ignore the very dream
of haste, walking everywhere very slowly and very much at random, and
to impute an esoteric sense to almost anything his eye may happen to
encounter. Almost everything in fact lends itself to the historic,
the romantic, the æsthetic fallacy--almost everything has an antique
queerness and richness that ekes out the reduced state; that of a grim
and battered old adventuress, the heroine of many shames and scandals,
surviving to an extraordinary age and a considerable penury, but with
ancient gifts of princes and other forms of the wages of sin to show,
and the most beautiful garden of all the world to sit and doze and count
her beads in and remember. He must hang a great deal about the huge
Palazzo Pubblico, which indeed is very well worth any acquaintance you
may scrape with it. It masses itself gloomily above the narrow street to
an immense elevation, and leads up the eye along a cliff-like surface
of rugged wall, mottled with old scars and new repairs, to the loggia
dizzily perched on its cornice. He must repeat his visit to the Etruscan
Gate, by whose immemorial composition he must indeed linger long to
resolve it back into the elements originally attending it. He must uncap
to the irrecoverable, the inimitable style of the statue of Pope Julius
III before the cathedral, remembering that Hawthorne fabled his Miriam,
in an air of romance from which we are well-nigh as far to-day as from
the building of Etruscan gates, to have given rendezvous to Kenyon at
its base. Its material is a vivid green bronze, and the mantle and tiara
are covered with a delicate embroidery worthy of a silver-smith.
Then our leisurely friend must bestow on Perugino’s frescoes in
the Exchange, and on his pictures in the University, all the placid
contemplation they deserve. He must go to the theatre every evening,
in an orchestra-chair at twenty-two soldi, and enjoy the curious
didacticism of “Amore senza Stima,” “Severita e Debolezza,” “La Societa
Equivoca,” and other popular specimens of contemporaneous Italian
comedy--unless indeed the last-named be not the edifying title applied,
for peninsular use, to “Le Demi-Monde” of the younger Dumas. I shall
be very much surprised if, at the end of a week of this varied
entertainment, he hasn’t learnt how to live, not exactly in, but with,
Perugia. His strolls will abound in small accidents and mercies of
vision, but of which a dozen pencil-strokes would be a better memento
than this poor word-sketching. From the hill on which the town is
planted radiate a dozen ravines, down whose sides the houses slide and
scramble with an alarming indifference to the cohesion of their little
rugged blocks of flinty red stone. You ramble really nowhither without
emerging on some small court or terrace that throws your view across a
gulf of tangled gardens or vineyards and over to a cluster of serried
black dwellings which have to hollow in their backs to keep their
balance on the opposite ledge. On archways and street-staircases and
dark alleys that bore through a density of massive basements, and curve
and climb and plunge as they go, all to the truest mediaeval tune,
you may feast your fill. These are the local, the architectural,
the compositional commonplaces.. Some of the little streets in
out-of-the-way corners are so rugged and brown and silent that you may
imagine them passages long since hewn by the pick-axe in a deserted
stone-quarry. The battered black houses, of the colour of buried
things--things buried, that is, in accumulations of time, closer packed,
even as such are, than spadefuls of earth--resemble exposed sections of
natural rock; none the less so when, beyond some narrow gap, you catch
the blue and silver of the sublime circle of landscape.
{Illustration: ETRUSCAN GATEWAY, PERUGIA.}
But I ought n’t to talk of mouldy alleys, or yet of azure distances,
as if they formed the main appeal to taste in this accomplished little
city. In the Sala del Cambio, where in ancient days the money-changers
rattled their embossed coin and figured up their profits, you may enjoy
one of the serenest aesthetic pleasures that the golden age of art
anywhere offers us. Bank parlours, I believe, are always handsomely
appointed, but are even those of Messrs. Rothschild such models of mural
bravery as this little counting-house of a bygone fashion? The bravery
is Perugino’s own; for, invited clearly to do his best, he left it as
a lesson to the ages, covering the four low walls and the vault with
scriptural and mythological figures of extraordinary beauty. They
are ranged in artless attitudes round the upper half of the
room--the sibyls, the prophets, the philosophers, the Greek and Roman
heroes--looking down with broad serene faces, with small mild eyes and
sweet mouths that commit them to nothing in particular unless to being
comfortably and charmingly alive, at the incongruous proceedings of a
Board of Brokers. Had finance a very high tone in those days, or were
genius and faith then simply as frequent as capital and enterprise are
among ourselves? The great distinction of the Sala del Cambio is that
it has a friendly Yes for both these questions. There was a rigid
transactional probity, it seems to say; there was also a high tide of
inspiration. About the artist himself many things come up for us--more
than I can attempt in their order; for he was not, I think, to an
attentive observer, the mere smooth and entire and devout spirit we at
first are inclined to take him for. He has that about him which leads
us to wonder if he may not, after all, play a proper part enough here
as the patron of the money-changers. He is the delight of a million of
young ladies; but who knows whether we should n’t find in his works,
might we “go into” them a little, a trifle more of manner than of
conviction, and of system than of deep sincerity?
This, I allow, would put no great affront on them, and one speculates
thus partly but because it’s a pleasure to hang about him on any
pretext, and partly because his immediate effect is to make us quite
inordinately embrace the pretext of his lovely soul. His portrait,
painted on the wall of the Sala (you may see it also in Rome
and Florence) might at any rate serve for the likeness of Mr.
Worldly-Wiseman in Bunyan’s allegory. He was fond of his glass, I
believe, and he made his art lucrative. This tradition is not refuted
by his preserved face, and after some experience--or rather after a good
deal, since you can’t have a _little_ of Perugino, who abounds wherever
old masters congregate, so that one has constantly the sense of being
“in” for all there is--you may find an echo of it in the uniform type of
his creatures, their monotonous grace, their prodigious invariability.
He may very well have wanted to produce figures of a substantial, yet at
the same time of an impeccable innocence; but we feel that he had taught
himself _how_ even beyond his own belief in them, and had arrived at
a process that acted at last mechanically. I confess at the same time
that, so interpreted, the painter affects me as hardly less interesting,
and one can’t but become conscious of one’s style when one’s style
has become, as it were, so conscious of one’s, or at least of its own,
fortune. If he was the inventor of a remarkably calculable _facture_, a
calculation that never fails is in its way a grace of the first order,
and there are things in this special appearance of perfection of
practice that make him the forerunner of a mighty and more modern race.
More than any of the early painters who strongly charm, you may take all
his measure from a single specimen. The other samples infallibly match,
reproduce unerringly the one type he had mastered, but which had the
good fortune to be adorably fair, to seem to have dawned on a vision
unsullied by the shadows of earth. Which truth, moreover, leaves
Perugino all delightful as composer and draughtsman; he has in each of
these characters a sort of spacious neatness which suggests that the
whole conception has been washed clean by some spiritual chemistry the
last thing before reaching the canvas; after which it has been applied
to that surface with a rare economy of time and means. Giotto and Fra
Angelico, beside him, are full of interesting waste and irrelevant
passion. In the sacristy of the charming church of San Pietro--a museum
of pictures and carvings--is a row of small heads of saints formerly
covering the frame of the artist’s Ascension, carried off by the French.
It is almost miniature work, and here at least Perugino triumphs in
sincerity, in apparent candour, as well as in touch. Two of the holy
men are reading their breviaries, but with an air of infantine innocence
quite consistent with their holding the book upside down.
Between Perugia and Cortona lies the large weedy water of Lake
Thrasymene, turned into a witching word for ever by Hannibal’s recorded
victory over Rome. Dim as such records have become to us and remote such
realities, he is yet a passionless pilgrim who does n’t, as he passes,
of a heavy summer’s day, feel the air and the light and the very
faintness of the breeze all charged and haunted with them, all
interfused as with the wasted ache of experience and with the vague
historic gaze. Processions of indistinguishable ghosts bore me company
to Cortona itself, most sturdily ancient of Italian towns. It must have
been a seat of ancient knowledge even when Hannibal and Flaminius came
to the shock of battle, and have looked down afar from its grey ramparts
on the contending swarm with something of the philosophic composure
suitable to a survivor of Pelasgic and Etruscan revolutions. These grey
ramparts are in great part still visible, and form the chief attraction
of Cortona. It is perched on the very pinnacle of a mountain, and I
wound and doubled interminably over the face of the great hill, while
the jumbled roofs and towers of the arrogant little city still seemed
nearer to the sky than to the railway-station. “Rather rough,” Murray
pronounces the local inn; and rough indeed it was; there was scarce a
square foot of it that you would have cared to stroke with your hand.
The landlord himself, however, was all smoothness and the best fellow in
the world; he took me up into a rickety old loggia on the tip-top of his
establishment and played showman as to half the kingdoms of the earth.
I was free to decide at the same time whether my loss or my gain was the
greater for my seeing Cortona through the medium of a festa. On the
one hand the museum was closed (and in a certain sense the smaller
and obscurer the town the more I like the museum); the churches--an
interesting note of manners and morals--were impenetrably crowded,
though, for that matter, so was the cafe, where I found neither an empty
stool nor the edge of a table. I missed a sight of the famous painted
Muse, the art-treasure of Cortona and supposedly the most precious, as
it falls little short of being the only, sample of the Greek painted
picture that has come down to us. On the other hand, I saw--but this is
what I saw.
{Illustration: A STREET, CORTONA.}
A part of the mountain-top is occupied by the church of St. Margaret,
and this was St. Margaret’s day. The houses pause roundabout it and
leave a grassy slope, planted here and there with lean black cypresses.
The contadini from near and far had congregated in force and were
crowding into the church or winding up the slope. When I arrived they
were all kneeling or uncovered; a bedizened procession, with banners
and censers, bearing abroad, I believe, the relics of the saint, was
re-entering the church. The scene made one of those pictures that
Italy still brushes in for you with an incomparable hand and from
an inexhaustible palette when you find her in the mood. The day was
superb--the sky blazed overhead like a vault of deepest sapphire. The
grave brown peasantry, with no great accent of costume, but with
sundry small ones--decked, that is, in cheap fineries of scarlet and
yellow--made a mass of motley colour in the high wind-stirred light.
The procession halted in the pious hush, and the lovely land around and
beneath us melted away, almost to either sea, in tones of azure scarcely
less intense than the sky. Behind the church was an empty crumbling
citadel, with half-a-dozen old women keeping the gate for coppers.
Here were views and breezes and sun and shade and grassy corners to the
heart’s content, together with one could n’t say what huge seated mystic
melancholy presence, the after-taste of everything the still open maw
of time had consumed. I chose a spot that fairly combined all these
advantages, a spot from which I seemed to look, as who should say,
straight down the throat of the monster, no dark passage now, but with
all the glorious day playing into it, and spent a good part of my stay
at Cortona lying there at my length and observing the situation over
the top of a volume that I must have brought in my pocket just for that
especial wanton luxury of the resource provided and slighted. In the
afternoon I came down and hustled a while through the crowded little
streets, and then strolled forth under the scorching sun and made the
outer circuit of the wall. There I found tremendous uncemented blocks;
they glared and twinkled in the powerful light, and I had to put on a
blue eye-glass in order to throw into its proper perspective the vague
Etruscan past, obtruded and magnified in such masses quite as with the
effect of inadequately-withdrawn hands and feet in photographs.
I spent the next day at Arezzo, but I confess in very much the same
uninvestigating fashion--taking in the “general impression,” I dare say,
at every pore, but rather systematically leaving the dust of the ages
unfingered on the stored records: I should doubtless, in the poor time
at my command, have fingered it to so little purpose. The seeker for
the story of things has moreover, if he be worth his salt, a hundred
insidious arts; and in that case indeed--by which I mean when his
sensibility has come duly to adjust itself--the story assaults him but
from too many sides. He even feels at moments that he must sneak along
on tiptoe in order not to have too much of it. Besides which the case
all depends on the kind of use, the range of application, his tangled
consciousness, or his intelligible genius, say, may come to recognize
for it. At Arezzo, however this might be, one was far from Rome, one
was well within genial Tuscany, and the historic, the romantic decoction
seemed to reach one’s lips in less stiff doses. There at once was the
“general impression”--the exquisite sense of the scarce expressible
Tuscan quality, which makes immediately, for the whole pitch of one’s
perception, a grateful, a not at all strenuous difference, attaches to
almost any coherent group of objects, to any happy aspect of the scene,
for a main note, some mild recall, through pleasant friendly colour,
through settled ample form, through something homely and economic too at
the very heart of “style,” of an identity of temperament and habit with
those of the divine little Florence that one originally knew. Adorable
Italy in which, for the constant renewal of interest, of attention, of
affection, these refinements of variety, these so harmoniously-grouped
and individually-seasoned fruits of the great garden of history, keep
presenting themselves! It seemed to fall in with the cheerful Tuscan
mildness for instance--sticking as I do to that ineffectual expression
of the Tuscan charm, of the yellow-brown Tuscan dignity at large--that
the ruined castle on the hill (with which agreeable feature Arezzo is no
less furnished than Assisi and Cortona) had been converted into a great
blooming, and I hope all profitable, podere or market-garden. I lounged
away the half-hours there under a spell as potent as the “wildest”
forecast of propriety--propriety to all the particular conditions--could
have figured it. I had seen Santa Maria della Pieve and its campanile
of quaint colonnades, the stately, dusky cathedral--grass-plotted and
residenced about almost after the fashion of an English “close”--and
John of Pisa’s elaborate marble shrine; I had seen the museum and its
Etruscan vases and majolica platters. These were very well, but the old
pacified citadel somehow, through a day of soft saturation, placed me
most in relation. Beautiful hills surrounded it, cypresses cast straight
shadows at its corners, while in the middle grew a wondrous Italian
tangle of wheat and corn, vines and figs, peaches and cabbages, memories
and images, anything and everything.
1873.